River Parishes uplifted by three schools’ trips to title games

Football in the River Parishes is as good as ever.

The area’s recovery from Hurricane Ida is still incomplete, but it’s getting there.

Those two things are intertwined.

Even more than 15 months after Ida devastated the region, folks from St. Charles Parish, St. John the Baptist Parish and St. James Parish are still fixing the place up. But the opportunity to follow their high-school football teams has lightened their burden a bit, and this weekend three of their teams will compete for state championships in the Caesars Superdome.

St. Charles Catholic will make the short trip from LaPlace to face Dunham for the Division III Select title Friday afternoon, followed by Destrehan’s game against Ruston for the Division I Non-Select Championship. Lutcher will play North DeSoto for the Division II Non-Select title at noon Saturday.

And there will be some cross-over rooting because folks from these neighboring parishes tend to be pretty neighborly.

“A lot of our fans are going to show up early to support (St. Charles Catholic), and I think a lot of their fans are going to stay after to support us,” Destrehan coach Marcus Scott said. “That’s what it’s about. We’re going to be there Saturday to see (Lutcher) play.”

High-school football presented the first pleasant distraction from cleaning up after Ida, which came on the heels of a year and a half of COVID-related challenges.

“Last year our parents really, really needed football,” St. Charles head coach Wayne Stein said. “So many of them told me it was such a great getaway from rebuilding their houses, from gutting their houses. Slowly but surely they’ve gotten back to some semblance of normalcy.”

In another sign of normalcy returning, all the title games are back under one roof – the 9.7-acre Superdome roof. The select championships bounced around the state in two of the last three seasons and Stein’s Comets won last season’s Division III state title at Yulman Stadium, defeating Lafayette Christian 32-27.

The River Parishes cover both sides of the Mississippi River and some of the most severe damage from Ida occurred in that region just as the 2021 high-school football season was about to kick off.

These parishes are home to eight high-school football programs – all of which have won state championships.

As residents rolled up their sleeves to dig out from the damage from Ida and await the return of electricity at least they had the start of the football season – albeit a delayed and shortened one – to look forward to.

Destrehan High sustained so much damage from Ida that when school resumed its students had to attend arch-rival Hahnville in Boutte on a platoon system for a few months.

“A lot of community people pulled together to make it happen and also to make it where the boys could be comfortable and compete,” Scott said. “The kids got dressed in tents for three weeks. We were without power for a while. It was a huge effort by a lot of parents, by a lot of the community members to get us through that time.”

And the football teams reciprocated by helping everyone else get through it as well.

As fate dictated, Destrehan and Hahnville were scheduled to play on the first weekend that playing a football game became feasible. Normally they would have met in prime time on a Friday night, but last year’s game was played at 3 p.m. on a Saturday because there was no electricity.

“That was a huge community event because people didn’t have power,” Scott said. “People were bringing ice in. We had to do all kinds of stuff to make it happen. But it was uplifting just to have football back. People had something to do. That was uplifting for the community. It really was.”

So was a game early this season between two of the River Parish teams playing for titles this week as Lutcher visited St. Charles. They treated their fans to an epic game in the first meeting since 2019.

“It’s one of our best rivalries,” Stein said. “It’s a clean rivalry. It’s a rivalry I think where the fans and the players respect one another.

“We had over 2,000 people there, which is hard to get nowadays with all of the live streaming and things like that. It went to the wire. It was everything you wanted in a River Parish football game.”

St. Charles led 21-20 when Lutcher took over at its 9-yard line with seven seconds remaining. Lutcher quarterback D’Wanye’ Winfield threw a long pass to Tylin Johnson, who got behind the St. Charles secondary to catch the pass, but Michael Hotard ran him down from behind and made a diving tackle at the 3-yard line with no time remaining.

“That is the grit that this area has,” Lutcher coach Dwain Jenkins said. “We’ll all reach out and help each other when we’re in need, but we’re all going to compete our butts off on the field.

“That’s the fabric of who we are as people. It makes us as coaches better, but it definitely gives us the type of kids that are going to give us the type of opportunity to compete at this high level year in and year out.”

Lutcher and St. Charles Catholic are familiar non-district opponents, and Lutcher and Destrehan are annual jamboree opponents. The coaches of the three teams all said that they play each other because the competition helps prepare each of them to get to the point they are at this weekend.

“I can tell you that those two games are games that we talk about all year long to prepare us for the point that we’re at right now,” Jenkins said.

Things are getting better in Destrehan, LaPlace, Lutcher and elsewhere in the River Parishes and other nearby communities that also were severely impacted by Ida.

“There are things every day that remind us of where we were,” Stein said. “You do have to take a pause and think about where we were a year ago and we’re still recovering. We still don’t have lights (in some places), we still have things destroyed that we hope to work on soon.”

Scott said Destrehan is still in the midst of “a massive renovation project” and “a large portion of our school building” is still unusable.

The communities continue to rebuild as the football teams try to bring home championships. The characteristics that have been seen weekly from championship-caliber football teams are characteristics that are seen daily from the entire citizenry.

“We’re resilient,” Jenkins said. “We’re hard-working, blue-collar folks for the most part. Hopefully we can all bring some hardware back to the river.”