Lutcher’s D’Wanye’ Winfield earns New Orleans Athlete of the Month honor

NEW ORLEANS – Lutcher High School quarterback D’Wanye’ “Lunch” Winfield has been selected as the Greater New Orleans Amateur Athlete of the Month for December. Monthly award-winners are selected by the Greater New Orleans Sports Awards Committee, sponsored by the Allstate Sugar Bowl. Winfield is the first Lutcher athlete to earn the honor since quarterback Gavin Webster was recognized in September of 2009.

Greater New Orleans Amateur Athletes of the Month

Winfield put the Bulldogs on his back and carried them to a ninth state football championship as he accounted for 798 yards and nine touchdowns in the final two games of the season. In a 28-25 victory over North DeSoto for the Division II non-select championship on December 10, Winfield rushed 43 times for 130 yards a touchdown and completed 20 of 32 passes for 299 yards and three more scores. On December 2, in a 35-21 semifinal win at West Feliciana, he rushed 45 times for 331 yards and all five Bulldog touchdowns while completing three of five passes for 38 yards. On the game-clinching drive, he carried the ball 17 consecutive times, culminating with a 3-yard touchdown run.

“I just don’t know more of what you can tell a kid to have 2,000 yards passing, 2,000 yards rushing and score 70 touchdowns and lead his team to a state championship,” Lutcher coach Dwain Jenkins told WGNO Sports. “The last two weeks [of the season], he had 90 carries. He had every touch on offense in the state championship except for three.”

“We wanted to be legendary around here,” said Winfield while standing on the Lutcher field beneath a billboard on the press box displaying the Bulldogs’ championship history. “We don’t celebrate district championships or things like that. We wanted to be legendary and known in this town for a long time, on the boards and things up there.”

For the season, Winfield accounted for 4,657 yards and 70 touchdowns. He was named Metro Player of the Year by Crescent City Sports and WGNO’s Friday Night Football and the Class 4A offensive player of the year by the Louisiana Sports Writers Association. Winfield capped off the month of December by announcing his commitment to UL Lafayette at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve.

Winfield earned the honor over a star college football player and a pair of women’s college basketball standouts.

• Sandra Cannady led the Loyola women’s basketball team to a perfect 4-0 month of December which lifted it to the No. 9 ranking in the NAIA national rankings. A senior from The Woodlands, Texas, Cannady averaged 17.8 points, 11.3 rebounds, 1.8 assists and 1.3 steals per game while shooting 61.2 percent from the field. She tallied three double-doubles during the month and now has 11 on the season. For the season, the 6-1 forward leads Loyola with 16.4 points and 10.2 rebounds per game while shooting a team-best 60.6 percent from the floor. With a record of 16-0 overall and 9-0 in Southern States Athletic Conference play, the Wolf Pack’s No. 9 ranking is its best since the 2015 season.
• Marta Galic averaged 14.1 points, 6.0 rebounds and 1.7 steals per game in December as she keyed a 5-2 month for the Tulane women’s basketball team. A senior guard from Croatia, Galic recorder her first career 20-point games with a pair of 21-point efforts during the month – one in a loss to No. 11 LSU and the other in a double-overtime victory over Troy. She also matched her career-best with 12 rebounds in a win over Southern – she has notched six double-digit rebounding efforts this year. For the season, Galic leads Tulane with 13.6 points and 7.3 rebounds per game.
• Michael Pratt, the Greater New Orleans Amateur Athlete of the Month for October, led the Tulane football team to its first conference championship since 1998 and its first-ever win in a conference championship game on Dec. 3 in Yulman Stadium. The junior from Boca Raton completed 20-of-33 passes for a career-high 394 yards and four touchdowns while also running for a fifth score as he earned MVP honors in a 45-28 victory over No. 22 UCF. After UCF scored back-to-back touchdowns to pull within three at 31-28 with 9:48 to go in the game, Pratt connected with Shae Wyatt for a 60-yard touchdown. While the Green Wave defense held strong, Pratt put the game away with an 18-yard TD run with 4:04 to go. The victory clinched a spot in the Cotton Bowl – Tulane’s first major bowl appearance since the 1938 season.

The Greater New Orleans Sports Awards Committee has been selecting an Amateur Athlete of the Month each month since 1957. The athlete must be a native of the greater New Orleans area or must compete for a team in the metropolitan region in order to be eligible.

The Allstate Sugar Bowl has established itself as one of the premier college football bowl games, having hosted 28 national champions, 102 Hall of Fame players, 52 Hall of Fame coaches and 21 Heisman Trophy winners in its 89-year history. The 90th Allstate Sugar Bowl Football Classic, which will double as a College Football Playoff Semifinal, is scheduled to be played on January 1, 2024. In addition to football, the Sugar Bowl Committee annually invests over $1 million into the community through the hosting and sponsorship of sporting events, awards, scholarships and clinics. Through these efforts, the organization supports and honors thousands of student-athletes each year, while injecting over $2.2 billion into the local economy in the last decade.