The varsity football team took on The Niceville Eagles Friday night at Westlake Stadium. The game looked tight at the beginning, but it ended up being a blowout, Westlake winning 66-7.

“Last year, a team from out of state came in and beat us — it didn’t feel right,” head coach Todd Dodge said. “This win really challenged our pride for our school, and our pride in the state of Texas.”

Niceville started off strong, returning a punt 90 yards to the house to put the Floridians up 7-0 early in the game. But on the next drive, Westlake leveled the game with a 66-yard touchdown run from Wisconsin-commit Nakia Watson to make the game 7-7 with 6:36 left in the first quarter.

“That was a really good football team we played, and they’re gonna win a lot of football games,” Dodge said. “We were very motivated though. We came out tonight, and our boys played tremendously physical football.”

Westlake took the lead for the first time of the night off a fake play, which resulted in a senior Izaiah Faz touchdown pass for 5-yards to quarterback junior Taylor Anderson to put Westlake up 14-7 at the end of the 1st quarter.

“The thing that I like offensively is that we could spread the ball around, and that a lot of different players contributed tonight,” Dodge said. “Overall, I’m just very proud of our team.”

Soon after, Westlake scored a 20-yard touchdown pass from Taylor Anderson to Jacob Ramos to begin the rout, making the score 21-7 with 10:39 left in the second quarter. Niceville ended up not scoring any more touchdowns the rest of the game paving the way for a Westlake blowout.

“It feels great to beat a top contender from Florida,” Dodge said. “One thing our team is starting to do this season is trust our coaches, when we tell them how good the other team is gonna be, and how ready we need to be for these types of games.”