GeauxPreps Week 4 Thursday Night Road Trip: Sacred Heart “Never Quit”
by Marshall Loeffler // GeauxPreps.com
OPELOUSAS – This Thursday’s road trip went down Highway 31 in St. Landry Parish to the beautiful Donald Gardner Stadium in Opelousas, home of the Opelousas Catholic Vikings. The facility has also hosted home games for Opelousas, JS Clark, and Berchmans Academy in recent years, and was recently converted to artificial turf.
I was thoroughly impressed with the usefulness of the entire facility and how it was able to accommodate a team of any size and still turn out a good game-day atmosphere. A few other areas around the state would benefit from having ready-to-use athletic fields for schools to share and help get games played in convenient locations. Anyway, I digress; there was a great game that took place as well!
The matchup between Opelousas Catholic and Sacred Heart-Ville Platte was a 3-0 game last fall, which was the exact score of this year’s contest at halftime. Both teams started out trying to set the edge for some outside runs, but OC’s linebackers (Lane Dugas, Aiden Lafleur, and Ethan Bellau) were quite effective patrolling that area of the field.
Sacred Heart did the same with guys like Landon Fontenot, Liam Kincanon, and Dax Landry, and both teams punted over 5 times apiece during a very short first half. William Chapman was able to get one through the uprights from 36 yards to give Sacred Heart a 3-0 lead at the break.
Opelousas Catholic got the ball to start the second half, and were clearly trying to get quarterback Kaleb Tezeno to spark the offense, both with his running and with the pass game. Tezeno had defenders spying him out of the Vikings’ spread set, but he did a great job finding creases where linebackers had overpursued and getting a few first downs.
Head Coach Kent Masson stuck with four and five receivers lined up, and Tezeno tried to find TySean Tolbert downfield a few times, but to no avail. Tolbert was someone that I was eager to see get a punt return opportunity, but the Trojans kicked away from him for most of the game.
Every scoring drive except for one (more on that soon) in the second half was a result of either team winning a field position battle. Other than a facemask penalty and a few offside flags, the referees had a clean, quiet night. Aiden Lafleur flipped the field with a deep punt, and that resulted in the Vikings getting a field goal.
OC got the ball back in plus territory again, where Kaleb Tezeno eventually got a goal line touchdown for a 10-3 lead going into the fourth quarter.
That is where this game went from a field position fight to a big play comeback. William Jaubert started this game at QB due to an injury to the Trojans starter and hung in tough throughout this game, finding Jax Fontenot and Aaron Lejeune on some big pass plays to start the fourth quarter.
Once Sacred Heart got into the red zone, they went with Lane Jaubert taking a shotgun snap and using his size to get a one-yard touchdown run that tied the game. Both teams traded punts again, and Lafleur pinned Sacred Heart back again. But the Trojans’ best drive of the game was forthcoming.
William Jaubert found Jax Fontenot on a long pass play to give them some room, and then Aaron Lejuene got room on a post route and scored on a sixty yard touchdown reception, giving Sacred Heart the lead with just over three minutes left. Their defense got a fourth down stop, and the road team finished off a big district win.
“We showed a lot of resilience tonight. Nobody on this team is selfish,” Lejeune told me after the game. “We are all patient on this team; we make the plays when they come to us, and you gotta make your shot when it comes.” He was one of four Trojan receivers that had to block all night long before finally getting to open up the pass game in the final quarter. “You saw that we never quit throughout the game. We took our hits, and we just never gave up.”
For first-year head coach Derek Landry, it was another example of how this group of Sacred Heart players has bought into his plan from day one. “If we trust our game plan and execute our game plan, we play well in the second half of games”, Landry said post-game. “We made zero adjustments at halftime. We just got on our guys about executing what we practiced, and our offense got going later in the game.”
So far, my Thursday night road trips have been more or less decided by the fourth quarter, so it was exciting to see a late-game comeback, and encouraging to see a group of upperclassmen embrace a new coaching staff, trust in what they came there to do, and get a big-time win for a team that will definitely contend in District 6-1A, and could also make a similar impact in Division IV Select if they continue this trend of resilient second-half play, tough defense up front, and a belief in what they started building over the summer.