Oct 12, 2018 3 min read

ROGERSVILLE – For the first time in the 2018 season, Clairton High School’s football team entered the locker room at halftime not only facing a deficit, but also scoreless, as the Bears were being blanked Friday night by a stout West Greene defense.

Fortunately for Clairton, which trailed 6-0 at half, head coach Wayne Wade’s halftime speech helped give them the jumpstart it needed as the Bears rolled to 33 unanswered points with the Pioneers’ Ben Jackson sidelined by an apparent injury.

“At halftime is was just, ‘Are we a championship team or not? Let’s come out and show who we are because if not, it’s going to show the second half,'” said Wade. “With their best player out – their running back out – we kind of took advantage of that. We started neutralizing them on offense and then we opened up our offense some and put points on the board.”

The Bears overcame West Greene 33-14 in a non-conference game after holding the Pioneers to just 181 total yards – 80 of which came on the final West Greene offensive play of the game.

“It was a tough task, they kind of wore us down,” said West Greene head coach Rod Huffman. “They’re a great football team. For us to have been where we were at at halftime I was very proud of our guys. We came out and we fought hard until the end.”

Neither team was able to get anything going in the first quarter as the game moved to the second 12 minutes in a 0-0 tie.

West Greene (5-3) then threw an interception with 6:20 left in the second quarter inside Clairton territory, but on Parsons’ first pass of the next drive, he was picked off by Kolin Walker, who promptly gave the Pioneers a 6-0 lead by returning it 41 yards for a touchdown.

The Bears had one more chance to score in the first half but turned the ball over on downs on the Pioneers’ 13-yard line.

Early in the third quarter, Clairton’s Kenlein Ogletree found the end zone from nine yards to tie the game 6-6.

From that point on, it became the Parsons show.

Parsons found the end zone on three straight drives – a 24-yard touchdown run, and two touchdown passes to Andress Wiggins – to extend the Bears’ lead to 25-6.

“In the second half he came out and really executed,” Wade said. “Him and Wiggins were a great connection for us earlier in the year, so hopefully we can get some of that back, plus the other guys still getting the ball.”

Clairton added on a 30-yard run by Taevon Thompson midway through the fourth quarter to give it 33 points. West Greene quarterback Gavin Scott found Nathan Brudnock with two minutes to go in the fourth quarter for an 80-yard touchdown, but that would be the last of the scoring.

Parsons finished 7 of 13 for 110 yards and two touchdowns in the air and added 64 yards on seven carries with a score on the ground.

“We have to get over this because it was tough on the guys,” Huffman said. “It’s tough when your leader (Ben Jackson) goes down. They pulled together, but it was too much for us to overcome tonight.”