It’s been a season of adjustments for the Westbrook High football team.

Three weeks ago, while preparing to face Deering, coach Jason McLeod and the rest of his staff implemented a new defense: they switched from a four-man front to a five-man front. And then, last week, before the Cheverus game, McLeod and Co. decided to scrap the option offense the Blue Blazes had been running and switch to the I-formation.

The changes are slowly but surely paying off – and at just the right time.

Westbrook won its second straight game Friday, beating Cheverus, 35-14, to improve to 2-2 for the season. This week, the Blue Blazes square off against defending state champion Bonny Eagle.

“We’re just trying to get these kids confident in themselves no matter who we’re playing, no matter how good or bad the opponent may be,” said McLeod, a first-year coach. “We’re trying to instill some confidence in both themselves and each other and the team. If we keep that up it doesn’t matter who we play, we’ll remain competitive.”

The Blue Blazes took their lumps against Deering that first week with the new defense, losing 49-8, but, according to McLeod, the players did gain some much-needed confidence. And it carried over into the next week’s game against South Portland, which Westbrook won 34-6.

Next came the switch from the option to the I.

“We just said, ‘We’re not an option team.’ We faced ourselves in the mirror and said, ‘We’ve got a great tandem of running backs,'” said McLeod. “We’ve got four guys, plus the quarterback, who we can give the ball to at any point in time and we wanted to get those guys downhill as much as we could.”

Junior running back Shawn Coffill led the charge Friday night against the Stags. He carried the ball 26 times for 92 yards. When Coffill needed a breather, senior captain Patrick Walsh (eight carries, 76 yards) stepped in. McLeod also worked in Brandon Robbins (six carries, 46 yards) and fullback Joel Chadbourne (three carries, 38 yards).

If you’re doing the math at home, that’s 43 touches for 252 yards, an average of almost six yards per carry. By establishing the run, the Blue Blazes were able to pass the ball when they had to. Coffill made the score 7-0 with a four-yard run on Westbrook’s second drive of the game, but quarterback Adam Hamilton put the game effectively out of reach with just his second pass of the game. Hamilton hit Walsh from five yards out to make it 14-0. Robbins made it 21-0 on a 10-yard run with 2:08 left in the second quarter.

“They came to play. They did well in all facets of the game,” said Cheverus coach Vin Salamone.

That included the defense, which limited the Stags to just one first down and 24 yards of total offense in the first half. Cheverus turned the ball over on a fumble once and was forced to punt on each of its other four possessions.

“We’ve got everyone healthy on defense and we just came out and played hard and made tackles when we had to,” said Walsh, also a linebacker. “The whole team fits well with (the new defense). We just play well and we play hard. It’s a whole different scheme, but Coach did a great job in practice easing into it and we got it down pretty well after that.”

The Stags finally got on the board with 28 seconds to go in the fourth quarter when Topher Pochebit turned a stripped ball into a 70-yard scoring scamper. But the Blue Blazes – who had put up another TD earlier on a throwback from Coffill to Hamilton – answered quickly on their next drive by marching 50 yards in less than three minutes. Walsh capped the drive with a seven-yard run on a toss right.

“We were fired up. The linemen knew what they were doing,” said Hamilton. “We worked hard at (the new offense) all week, so they had their timing down.

“(Bonny Eagle) is a tough team, so we’ll see what we can do. We’ve got the momentum, though.”