THE OFFICIAL SITE OF
Odessa High School Athletics

As game film flickered across the projection screen in the OHS Fieldhouse all throughout this past week, it must have looked a bit like a firework display right there inside the dimmed coaches’ office. Bang. Qua Gray throws another bomb. Boom. Blair Conwright flashes by. Pow. Touchdown, Lubbock Coronado. “That’s their deal: Explosive plays,” Odessa High head coach Danny Servance said. As the Bronchos spent the week preparing for Friday’s opponent, ‘explosive’ might just have been a word left ringing in their ears like a pop of gunpowder. Odessa High will host Lubbock Coronado and its powerful offense when the teams meet at 7:30 p.m. Friday at Ratliff Stadium. The Mustangs enter at 2-0, after blowing by Plainview 56-14 in their season opener before dropping Wichita Falls Rider 42-28 last week. Through those two wins, Gray, the Mustangs’ senior quarterback, has thrown for 640 passing yards and nine touchdowns on 38-of-54 passing. His top receiver, Conwright, has hauled in 16 catches for 295 yards and four scores. They spearhead a Mustangs team looking to charge its way to another big season, after an 11-2 year and a run into the third round of the Class 5A Division I playoffs in 2016. Friday, they’ll rumble through Ratliff — where the Bronchos will have to make sure they don’t give that offense anything easy. “You’ve got to make them earn it,” Servance said on Tuesday, standing on Coleman Field just after another practice in preparation for the Mustangs. “You can’t afford to give them anything. “Coach Parr, he’s a mastermind, offensively, with what he does,” he added. About 140 miles to the north, Parr has expected nothing less from the Bronchos during his own preparation this week. The Bronchos, too, stand 2-0 after the first two weeks of the season. And the Mustangs’ fourth-year head coach doesn’t expect Friday to be anything like his team’s 63-14 romp in the same matchup last year. “I’ve seen a lot of improvement,” Parr said over the phone Wednesday. “One thing that really stands out to me is the hustle and the effort. Scheme and all that stuff is all great, but if you can’t get all 11 to buy in and hustle to the football you don’t really have a chance.” As he pored over the Odessa High defense this week, he has seen that — with Bronchos swarming to the ballcarrier. “One thing about Odessa: Every time I stop the tape, I see all 11 there,” he said. He expects to see that Friday, as the Bronchos under defensive-minded Servance work to slow offensive-minded Parr and his Mustangs. Those two are plenty familiar with one another. Servance and Parr squared off even when Servance was at Lubbock Estacado, before he left there for Odessa High in January 2016, and Parr was at Amarillo Caprock, where he coached before heading to Coronado in the summer of 2014. “I’ve battled him when I was at Estacado and he was at Caprock, and now that he’s at Coronado I’ve seen him do really good things with that program — because that program was suffering a little bit before he got there,” Servance said. “He has turned it around and got them going, and got those kids believing. “They’re playing at a high level right now.” Parr arrived at Coronado after the Mustangs suffered through back-to-back 2-8 seasons. In his first two years with the group, Coronado went 3-7 both seasons, until the Mustangs’ breakout season in 2016. But now, Parr sees a reflection of his own program when he looks at Odessa High. The Bronchos entered this season on a 15-game win streak, but opened the fall with a 28-24 win over Lubbock Monterey and a 28-21 win over Amarillo High. “They’ve done a really good job in the offseason of getting those kids to buy in,” Parr said of Servance and his staff. “That’s something that we try to instill every day here. “They got it done a lot quicker than we did. It took us three years and he only did it in a year.” Now, Parr said, the Mustangs are learning to work with targets on their backs. He saw plenty of good things in his team’s six-touchdown win over Plainview in the season opener, but last week, Gray had to connect with Conwright for a 37-yard touchdown pass to tie the game at 28 with 5:21 to go, before the Mustangs picked up two more late touchdowns to pull away from Wichita Falls Rider. Coronado sophomore running back Kaleb Manuel ran in two late touchdowns for the Mustangs, in relief for senior three-year starter Jarrod Compton, who was injured in the season opener. “We’ve got to learn to be hunted, and not the hunter anymore,” Parr said. “We’re going to get everybody’s best shot, and we’ve got to learn to take that approach.” This Friday, Odessa High looks to give Coronado just that. “We’re going to have to play mistake-free football, and disciplined football, and try not to make mistakes that will give them big, explosive plays, and try to make them earn everything that they get,” Servance said. Servance said the Bronchos may not face anyone with a better offense than Coronado’s this season — but that Odessa High is fired up about facing the challenge. “They’re excited about it,” Servance said of his players. “We try to focus on the task at hand, and that’s Coronado. What we did last week was over. “All of our attention is right here on Lubbock Coronado, because they are a very good football team, and we’re going to have to play great football in order to stay on the field.”

THE OFFICIAL SITE OF
Odessa High School Athletics

‘EXPLOSIVE’ LUBBOCK CORONADO SET TO CHALLENGE ODESSA HIGH

JUSTIN LEE

Odessa American | 9/13/2017

PHOTO CREDIT: Courtney Sacco