Sons also Shine: Coaches Neil Weiner, Tommy Johns, Stu Cook praise fathers in glow of state championships
by William Weathers // GeauxPreps.com Contributor
Nearly 12 hours after Iowa’s watershed moment, a 50-43 victory Saturday over North DeSoto for the school’s first state championship, father and son sat on the family’s couch in the wee hours of Sunday morning, rewatching the Yellow Jackets’ historic achievement.
There was a particular sequence of interest to Iowa offensive coordinator Stu Cook; he wanted to bounce off his Hall of Fame father, Lewis Cook, with the Yellow Jackets facing a fourth-and-two situation, holding a 28-22 lead late in the second quarter.
The on-field deliberation between Stu Cook and head coach Tommy Johns ranged from going for it from North DeSoto’s 43-yard line, trying to keep the ball away from North DeSoto’s high-octane offense, are punting the ball away with less than a minute to go.
Iowa quarterback Lawston Broussard handed the ball off to Kaston Lewis for a seven-yard gain and a first down. The Yellow Jackets picked up another first down on an 18-yard completion from Broussard to Houston signee Jeremiah Bushnell, voted the team’s Outstanding Player, to North DeSoto’s 14. A final carry from Broussard was good for six yards on the final play of the half.
“We chose to let the clock run down a bit and not risk giving them the ball back with more time,” Stu said. “He (his dad) said he would have done the same.”
It was a reassuring exchange that the Cook family coaching legacy operated on the same wavelength.
The Cooks were among three such father-son coaching stories that reached a happy conclusion in last week’s Prep Classic at the Caesars Superdome.
Not only did Iowa win the first state championship in the 72-year existence of the football program, but Yellow Jackets’ date with destiny was home to another father-son storyline with Tommy Johns’ first state championship taking place with his father, Mike Johns, on the sideline in the waning moments.
Mike Johns spent 35 of his 48-year coaching career at three schools in Calcasieu Parish with 13 more at St. Louis Catholic. The father-son duo coached together at St. Louis Catholic for nine years before Tommy went to Iowa 12 years ago, the first three as an assistant, with the last nine as head coach, and guided the Yellow Jackets to the first state title for a Calcasieu Parish school since 1972.
Tommy remembered some of the close calls his father endured during his tenure.
“I know how difficult it is,” said Tommy, who played for his dad at LaGrange. “Even growing up as kid, being there close numerous times. They (LaGrange) missed an extra point in 1994 against Hahnville at McNeese in overtime (28-27). He always told me if I ever got in that situation in a game, your ass better go for two. I told him you got it and he still reminds me of that.”
The father-son duo of Red and David Franklin reached their 12th state championship with Haynesville’s 39-37 victory over Mangham. It was David’s fourth state crown, and the Golden Tornado completed a perfect season (14-0) nine months after the passing of Red Franklin.
Dunham had been a regular in the Superdome with its third trip to the Division III select final in the past four years.
Coach Neil Weiner’s Tigers finally broke through, building a 10-point halftime lead and putting together a complete performance in a 34-17 victory over Calvary Baptist for the school’s second state title and first since 2004.
For Weiner, it meant the first state championship in his 21-year coaching career and his 12th season at Dunham. It also put him in the rare company of joining his father, Dale Weiner, as a father-son duo to win state championships.
Dale Weiner, who was inducted into the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame in June, led Catholic-Baton Rouge to the 2015 Division I select state title, a highlight in a distinguished career with 317 victories, the sixth most on the state’s career list before the 2025 season.
“I think about my dad a lot,” Neil Weiner said during his postgame news conference. “Him not having the physical ability to be here to be present, but to watch. You know it’s great. Whether I win a state championship or not, my dad loves me so much, and what a great reflection of our Heavenly Father that loves us no matter what we do. Whether we get it right or we get it wrong, he still loves us.”
Neil Weiner has established impeccable credentials during his two-decade-plus career at three schools: Catholic-Pointe Coupee, Zachary, and Dunham.
He’s amassed 110 of his 170 wins and six of his 10 district championships at Dunham.
Yet there was a moment during that reign of success that challenged Neil Weiner to the point of leaving the profession.
Dunham had gone through a perfect 2018 season and had a first-round bye in the playoffs. The Tigers were considered one of the front-runners for that season’s title with the talents of five-star prospect Derek Stingley Jr., who would star on LSU’s 2019 national championship team and become a first-round draft pick of the Houston Texans, where he’s considered one of the league’s top cornerbacks.
Dunham’s playoff life expectancy didn’t last beyond the second round. The Tigers lost 35-7 to Catholic-New Iberia, which went on to a state runner-up finish.
“We lost that game, and I said to myself that if I can’t win a state championship with Derek Stingley, I’ll never do it,” Weiner said. “There was a part of me that felt I was doing the wrong thing; I shouldn’t be coaching. I’m a loser. I’m worried about what people are saying on the internet, worried about what other coaches think about me. It took about three days, and I thought about a saying from one of the founders of Catholic High (his alma mater in Baton Rouge). It’s something I share with our team, and I share at the beginning of every year, ‘When you’ve done all that you can, you’ve done all that you must.’
“I said that team (2018) played their tails off every single week and our coaches were prepared every single game,” Weiner said. “We didn’t win a (state) championship, but we did all that we could, and that was all that we must do. It occurred that if I’m telling my kids that and to believe that I needed to stop being a hypocrite and I needed to start believing it.”
Weiner sought solace from scripture, finding it in Apostle Paul’s letter to Romans (12:2) that encourages believers not to adopt the patterns of the world, but to be transformed by renewing their minds.
He wasn’t as results-driven, instead trying to adhere to a higher power in everything he did. The results have certainly followed, giving him a sense of peace.
Over the past four years, Weiner, twice the Class 2A Coach of the Year and 10-time District Coach of the Year, has guided Dunham to three trips to the state championship game, complete with the school’s second-ever state title.
“When I decided that I wasn’t going to try and be validated by other people’s opinions, I said, ‘You know what, I’m going to do my best to honor GOD in everything that I do’,” he said. “Then I don’t really care about the results anymore. I believe that wholeheartedly. I talk to our kids about that all the time. It’s not about winning a championship; it’s not about winning a game. It’s all about how you prepare, how you honor GOD in the way you work every single week.
“After that 2018 season, we’ve been to the semifinals four years, the dome three years, and tonight we won a state championship,” he said. “God is good all the time.”
With Parkinson’s disease taking its toll on Dale Weiner and his ability to travel, he placed a call to Neil the night before Dunham’s state championship game. His message was brief and to the point.
“He wanted to make sure that I knew that he loved me,” Neil said. “What happened tonight (state title) was extra special. Knowing that I’ve got a mom and dad that love me like that, that’s what is great about these guys. They know they have a coach who loves them no matter what. I’m excited for these kids to win a championship, but I don’t need a championship to validate me.”
Lewis Cook is the state’s third-winningest coach with a 419-104 record in 41 years of coaching. He’s spent a total of 52 years coaching, counting a pair of stints as offensive coordinator at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
For the past 29 years, he’s been the coach of Notre Dame of Acadia Parish, where the Pios are 321-59 with four of his five state championships.
During the junior season of Stu Cook, a running back, Notre Dame won the 2009 state championship, giving him a unique view of winning a state championship as both a player and coach.
“A lot of the guys I graduated with, and played with, all asked me the same question: Which one was more sweet?”, he said. “The one as a coach is a little sweeter because you see the kids’ faces after. You see the community. As a player, all you were worried about was playing. You wanted to play well for your guys and your coaches. As a coach, there’s a lot more that goes into it, and to see the joy and satisfaction on your guys’ faces after. In my opinion, you really can’t top that.”
Cook served as a student coach under his father for two years (2012-13), experiencing a trip to the Superdome in ’12 when the Pios fell to Parkview Baptist in the Class 3A title game.
“To get that experience as a 20-year-old was pretty cool,” he said.
Cook became a full-time teacher/coach at Crowley High in 2016 before his journey took him two years later to North Vermilion and back to Crowley for one more season.
The paths of Stu Cook and Tommy Johns crossed on Thanksgiving of 2019. With both of their teams having been eliminated from postseason play, they elected to meet on Thanksgiving and talked for three to four hours, leading to Cook’s hiring at Iowa.
“We were both kind of miserable,” Cook said. “We weren’t doing anything on Thanksgiving because we did something the week before. It was just a good fit for me. They are tough, gritty, hard-nosed, blue-collar people. The kids want to be good. They want to be coached hard. They want to do what’s right with you as a coach. The kids and people are very loyal. It’s like a throw-back town.”
Cook acknowledged entertaining the thought of another career path, following his older brother Jeff to the Sterling Automotive Group in Opelousas, where he’s the company’s sales director.
“When I was younger, I tried to avoid coaching in all honesty,” he said. “I wanted to go make a good living at Sterling. But I always knew I was supposed to coach. In the sixth and seventh grade, my dad stored all of his Crowley films in the closet under the stairwell. I watched the Crowley-Wossman games in 1988 and 1989 (his dad’s first state title). I loved watching how he called the game back then, and you have all of these clips from Notre Dame, and it’s the same thing.”
In the simplest terms, the ‘Cook offensive philosophy’ centered around the ability to run the football and stop the run.
The biggest difference, Stu says, is his preference to line up in the ‘pistol’ formation – having his quarterback several yards behind the center – while his dad usually has his quarterback under center.
“We run the same stuff my dad runs, but you just allow your quarterback to have a little bit more freedom within the pistol,” he said. “It’s the same plays, but we back the quarterback up.”
Iowa was an offensive juggernaut in Friday’s Division II state championship game, piling up 588 total yards. The Jackets were extremely explosive on the ground with 405 yards on 56 carries (7.2 yards per carry) where Lewis was the team’s leading rusher with 172 yards and two touchdowns, and J’Vien Adams added 158 yards and a score on 24 attempts.
“We knew they knew they were going to be hard to stop,” Cook said. “We asked the coaches what they thought, and (offensive line) coach (Chuck) Gorman felt they could block them, and he was right.”
When North DeSoto scored on its first series of the third quarter for a 29-28 lead, it set off a chain reaction over the next 16 minutes of six lead changes.
That’s when Broussard’s keeper around left end for 11 yards gave Iowa its go-ahead score, 50-43.
Iowa’s defense held North DeSoto on fourth down from its own 6-yard line, and the offense took more than four minutes off the clock before having to punt.
A roughing-the-punter penalty kept the ball with Iowa, who was able to run out the final 2:07, setting off celebrations amongst coaches and players on the sideline.
Jeff rounded up Stu’s three children (his recently born daughter was home with his wife) and staged a family photo on the floor of the Superdome.
“He was tearing up after the game, which I thought was really cool,” Stu said of his dad. “I didn’t know how much it meant to him. We had a lot of aunts and uncles there as well. The first person I wanted to find was Tommy. We’d been talking about this and trying to get there, and when you finally do, it’s like, ‘Dude, we finally did it. ’
“They found me,” Stu said of his family. “It was a cool embrace by all of us. It was so neat to have everyone there. I got to visit with my dad in the tunnel, and we got to talk. I wish you could capture that moment and stay in it for as long as it can last.”
Tommy Johns had begun changing Iowa’s fortunes in his first season with an 11-2 record and an appearance in the second round of the playoffs.
The Jackets had their first undefeated regular season in 2017 and wound up 10-2 with another trip to the state regionals. Two straight losing seasons followed, and three consecutive years without postseason play.
They would get the program back on track in 2021, starting a stretch of five straight winning seasons, which included the school’s first appearance in the state semifinals in ’22. Another trip to the state quarterfinals, where they upended for the straight consecutive year falling to North DeSoto, was still a sign of the Jackets’ stability under Johns and a coaching staff that included Stu Cook, that’s put together a 49-10 stretch over the past five seasons.
Iowa came painstakingly close to its first appearance in the Superdome, tying last year’s semifinal at 29-29 with Franklinton when the Demons drove and scored the game-winning touchdown with 1:19 remaining.
That set the stage for the program’s ‘dream’ season, filled with another perfect regular season and bigger ambitions.
Besides his own father, Tommy Johns was also appreciative of his coaching ties to such Southwest Louisiana giants as Charles Vicknair, James Kirkendall, and Wayne Cespiva.
All three men had coached with his Johns’ father at some points in their careers and had an even greater impact on the younger Johns on his ascent through the coaching ranks.
He didn’t forget them after the biggest moment of his career.
“The lessons those guys taught me, I’ll never forget,” he said. “I still use a lot of the same ones today, to me it’s something to share with all the guys around here. It’s a lot of us who have had success because of them, because of the ways they taught us. I’ve been fortunate to grow up in an era where I’ve had plenty of the old-school ways of doing things. It’s two completely different generations of the way the game’s played and often the way it’s coached.”
With his team scoring the last three times it touched the ball before taking the last 2:07 off the clock, Johns experienced a rollercoaster of emotions with his team trading blows with North DeSoto, combining for six leads changes in the second half.
When Broussard scored the go-ahead touchdown with 8:38 remaining, Johns thought, ‘Did this just really happen?”
He’s never quite comfortable with shotgun snaps leading to kneel downs, making certain the center’s snap reached Broussard’s hands, to continue moving the clock toward a career milestone.
With his father suffering from Parkinson’s, the appearance of Mike Johns on the field took some careful maneuvering. Before taking a seat on a platform on the sideline for a team picture, the two Johns enjoyed a moving embrace.
“It definitely was an emotional moment,” said Tommy, 75-27 in his career, a five-time district Coach of the Year, Class 3A Coach of the Year, and two-time Southwest Louisiana Coach of the Year. “To have him down on the sideline after we won, to take the team picture, it meant a lot.”
With his dad’s ability to speak hindered by a laryngectomy procedure 12 years ago, Tommy clearly understood the words coming out of his dad’s mouth.
“He does struggle to talk a little bit,” he said. “I heard every word that he said, even though it was as loud as it was. It was a very surreal moment. He said it’s been a long time coming, and I love you.”