Oberlin moving forward with football season
by William Weathers // GeauxPreps.com Contributor
Oberlin High principal Lauri Phillips didn’t refer to it as a ‘Hail Mary’ although it was a desperation heave late in the fourth quarter.
With the school’s football team plagued by declining roster numbers this fall, sinking to a low of 15, Oberlin High’s booster club organized a meeting on Sunday that Phillips said was the catalyst in allowing the 2025 season to take place as scheduled.
The gathering brought together parents and students from the school in the town of less than 1,700 together – a day before a decision was forthcoming on the future of the program, to speak and share ideas to attract additional players.
It worked.
Four players wound up signing after the meeting, bringing the team’s roster numbers to 19, but third-year football coach Curt Ware said Wednesday that two more players have joined the program for a total of 21.
Oberlin opens the season at Vinton on Sept. 5.
“That meeting is what saved Oberlin football,” said Phillips, in her fifth year at the Allen Parish school and second as principal. “Social media can have so many negative impacts. Those members stepping up and organizing the meeting is what rallied and allowed people to speak openly.”
Phillips was part of a meeting on Monday with Allen Parish Superintendent Brad Soileau that evaluated the school’s position to go forward on the ’25 season or drop down to junior varsity for two years.
The state’s governing body on high school athletics, the Louisiana High School Athletic Association, stipulates that any team forfeiting two-plus games during a season must play a junior varsity schedule for two years without forfeiting more than two games during that span to return to varsity status.
“I heard about the (Sunday) meeting but didn’t go because I didn’t want to be a distraction,” said Ware, a coaching veteran of more than 30 years. “I know people get upset and think maybe it’s the coach, and think if they had a different coach, maybe we could have more players out.
“What I wanted to know was whether it was a consensus that felt I was the problem,” Ware said. “If they felt I was the problem, I’ve been through DROP. I’d step down and retire, but I was proud to know there was an overwhelming consensus that felt they needed to be behind the coach and get these kids out. I just enjoy coaching.”
Lagging roster numbers have plagued Oberlin, a 7-12 campus, which has incurred a gradual decline in enrollment over the past decade.
Phillips said the school used to have 80 boys amongst its student population, a number that’s been sharply reduced to 53 male students and 171 overall for the 2025-26 school year.
“We have 25 or 26 of them that have ever played sports,” Ware said.
During his first year at the Class 1A school, Ware fielded a roster of 21 players that went 8-2 during the regular season, won the District 4-1A championship, and advanced to the second round of the Division IV non-select playoffs.
“I didn’t realize the school was this small when I got here,” he said. “I knew they were Class A, but had played football for 100 years or whatever. We had 21 kids the first year, but not all 21 were created equal. We had 13-14 that were either juniors or seniors, and it’s the opposite right now.
“We have six or seven seniors,” he said. “We started with 20 (players) last year and had a bunch of injuries. At one point, we were down to 15, and I was afraid we weren’t going to make it. We managed to piece it together and made the playoffs. The kids never quit and played hard. But the problem’s not going away.”
Phillips understood the town’s love affair with football, which includes a Class B state championship in 1960, and two state runner-up finishes the previous two years.
The Tigers feature one of the state’s top players during that period in Hoyle Granger, a two-time all-state selection and the state’s MVP in ’61.
Granger went on to star at Mississippi State, where he’s a member of the school’s Hall of Fame and the Mississippi Hall of Fame, both of whom inducted him in ’08.
He also gained entry in the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame in ’05, a talented football player that was the fifth-round selection of the AFL’s Houston Oilers and played in the league’s all-star game in ’67 and ’68.
Granger, a seven-year professional football player, was also named Allen Parish’s greatest athlete in ’17.
“When you say Oberlin, people say football,” Phillips said. “The saying is, ‘Be ready to hit somebody’.”
Pat Miller coached Oberlin to an 11-2 record that included the state quarterfinals in ’09, and Durell Peloquin spent seven years coaching the Tigers, where they experienced highwater marks in ’18 with an 11-3 record and a trip to the state quarterfinals.
A year later, Oberlin was 12-1 and reached the state semifinals against Oak Grove. Last year’s postseason appearance – a loss to North Iberville – was the 37th in school history.
When Phillips met with each male student on campus last Friday, she appealed to their sense of pride, their sense of community that visibly support the Tigers each Friday evening.
“I asked them what they thought about when they thought about Oberlin,” she said. “Ideally, when you think about it, the communities behind Oberlin football. The future was in their hands if they were going to decide to play.
“I asked them to go through the weekend and kind of think about their love for the game,” she said. “If there were reasons why they weren’t possibly playing. Was it worth sacrificing for the community? I told them there’s no ‘i’ in team.”
Oberlin’s a rural town, sits directly halfway between Oakdale and Kinder on Hwy. 165.
While agriculture is a catalyst in Oberlin, the parish seat, it hasn’t attracted residents the way their neighbors in Oakdale, with their plants and businesses, or Kinder, with its casino, have managed to do so.
Oberlin is also home to one of three meat processing centers statewide, Phillips said.
The residual effect has taken a toll on the town’s lone high school which sits next to the elementary.
“We don’t have people moving into Oberlin,” Phillips said. “We’ve got to work with what we have, teach the kids the commitment, values, the morales behind it. It’s not about playing football, but life lessons when you step off the field.”
Ware’s career was largely spent at Class 4A and 5A programs, where the only question going into a season centered around the team’s performance level.
The former Eunice High defensive coordinator, who was on staff when the Bobcats were Class 3A state runners-up in consecutive years, was the head coach at Rayne High, where he won 84 games, and New Iberia for a total of 19 seasons.
“Numbers were never an issue, and whether you were going to play or not,” Ware said. “We may not have had a great team year to year, but this is a whole new game for me.”
Ware adapted his first year at Oberlin to a sparse roster, winning eight games in the regular season, going undefeated in league play, where the Tigers’ closest game in district was a 20-16 win over Basile.
With a roster constructed with similarly low numbers in ’24, the dynamic was reversed – something that’s taking place again this season – with a shortage of upperclassmen playing key roles in the leadership of the team, leading to a 3-8 season and first-round playoff exit.
Ware alerted Phillips earlier this spring of an impending battle with low roster numbers, something that continued into the offseason and threatened to derail this season.
The wheels were put in motion when Ware addressed the available boys on campus, followed by Phillips’ plea, along with other members of the coaching staff, last Friday, before the all-important pitch from the school’s booster club two days later.
“I told them we would reevaluate things and look at numbers on Monday,” Phillips said. “We had 15 kids at that point, and we had to consider their safety.
“The difference from Curt’s first year was that he had a junior-senior heavy team,” Phillips said. “This time we are not. We’re looking at a heavy number of kids that have never touched the field for varsity football.”
Football may be at the epicenter of a school’s activity, but there are several other layers at Oberlin that contribute to the school’s entire experience, especially on Friday nights.
Oberlin has an enthusiastic cheer team that tries to stimulate the home crowd to provide an electric environment.
The Tigers also have a color guard that performs at halftime of each game, while a dedicated group of managers and trainers has been prepared to assist coaches and players at a moment’s notice.
“It impacted more than the football players,” Phillips said.
Once again, Phillips met individually with each male student on Monday, trying to determine whether Oberlin would have enough players and a season this year.
This was the deadline given for the immediate future of the program, creating an anxious feeling on campus, where Phillips received her share of students wanting a resolution.
“Instruction was interrupted, I went outside to the field for athletic P.E. and counted kids,” she said. “I went back and reported to the superintendent (Brad Soileau) that we had the numbers, we were going to play football.”
Ware remained hopeful of getting at least 22 players who could adequately provide 11 players on either side of the football to conduct practice.
He knows the current tally doesn’t guarantee the kind of results he’s looking for, with a great majority of those players having to play both ways.
“I’m doing this for fun, and this has not been that much fun,” he said. “Now that we’re going to play, we’re going to try and win some games. Even though it’s 21, we don’t have 21 that can play. I’ve expressed to Lauri there are some names on the roster that I refuse to put on the field that can’t protect themselves. We hope to get to 15-16 that can actually play, and we’re not close to that number.”
The current makeup of the roster has approximately seven players who can position on the offensive and defensive lines, with one player, a 225-pounder, an eighth grade capable of serving as a rotational player.
Ware plans to be strategic in practice. He’ll try and have two practices daily – one each for offense and defense – with the first sessions lasting an hour in the morning, the second extending to 90 minutes after school.
“Everybody’s got to go both ways and learn both sides,” he said.
Because of the state of flux, the program’s been in this month, Ware opted to cancel the team’s scrimmage against Class 2A Port Barre, which has a roster of 50-plus players.
The Tigers will focus on hosting this year’s jamboree on Aug. 29 with 15-minute segments against Kinder at 6 p.m. and Oakdale in the evening’s final matchup.
Oberlin’s first game will be against Bolton Academy on Sept. 12, with homecoming set for Oct. 17 against Merryville.
“I’m really excited,” Phillips said. “I’m hoping the community’s going to show up as well because the kids are going to be looking for that.”
A day after the announcement was made, football would remain a staple at the school, Ware said. There was a clear sense of excitement on campus that was present at the team’s practice that afternoon.
“It was much more a sense of normalcy,” he said. “You could tell the kids felt better … we’re playing. Everything’s good.”