West Chester Visits Millersville Saturday

By Matt Leon

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- West Chester University will be looking for a second straight win on Saturday when they play their first Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference game of the season, visiting Millersville.

The 1-2 Golden Rams picked up their first win last week, riding a 356-all purpose yard performance from sophomore running back Jarel Elder to a 48-38 victory over Seton Hill.

"The first thing is we got the win, that was the most important thing," West Chester head coach Bill Zwaan tells KYW Newsradio. "Jarel Elder did have an unbelievable day. We were calling it a (former West Chester star running back) Rondell White-type of day because he mixed everything in. Little kickoff return, a little receiving yardage and a lot of rushing yardage. The key thing was he got the four touchdowns and we needed pretty much every yard and every touchdown because Seton Hill gave us a real tough time of it. So the second positive was that we were behind late and had to comeback to win and our kids hung in there and got the job done."

Listen to the entire interview with West Chester's Bill Zwaan

Elder got such a heavy workload because starting running back Brandon Monk was out with an injury. This week the Golden Rams will have an embarrassment of riches in the backfield.

"Brandon will be back starting and Jarel will probably get more reps," Zwaan says.

West Chester on Saturday will be taking on a Millersville team that is really struggling. The Marauders are 0-3 and last week they lost to Slippery Rock, 75-0. They were outgained in the game 553 yards to 38. Millersville had -52 yards rushing.

Zwaan says he wants his team to build on the momentum of last week's win.

"One of the main things for us now, it's still early in the season, still a lot of young guys playing, is us keep getting better each week," Zwaan says. "So there are some weeks where we don't look as much at the opponent as we do at ourselves. We've got to get better in the run game, cut down the penalties, we had a terrible amount of penalties last week, and improve ourselves in being efficient, both offensively and defensively. Certainly, we're not playing great defense up to this point, so we want that to improve. So a lot of our practice this week has been working on our deficiencies, as well as being prepared for Millersville. It's up to us to get better as a football team and that's what this week is all about for us."

West Chester and Millersville will kickoff at 1:00pm on Saturday.

You can follow Matt on Twitter @mattleonkyw.