Out of the fog

The hearts of the Trojans carried these brave ancient soldiers onto the battlefield. They were always loyal and true as they fought bravely one for all and all for their home in the Halls of Troy. This same attitude still beats today in the hearts of those Sacred Heart football players who step onto the field wearing the blue and gold.
Long before the football field was known as Soileau-Landry Field, a group of these same Trojan football players stepped foot onto a foggy field in Sicily Island 50 years ago and brought back the Class B state championship.
The coach then was half of the field’s current namesake, Bobby Soileau. He and four of his players; Dr. Chuck Aswell, Gary Inhern, Jay LeBlanc, and Ebby Perrodin; along with his scout Ted Lemoine sat down together around microphones at the KVPI studios with The Gazette partaking in the interview for a chance to share memories of this Red Letter event in Sacred Heart history. These players relived that history making season through stories that could never be forgotten.
“I don’t know of any coach ever who had fun going to football practice like I did when I had these guys playing ball for me,” Soileau said. “I had won a few state championships in boxing, and I told these guys once you win a state championship you will never forget it. It’s been a great feeling to have coached these guys because they led me to another state championship, and I’ll never forget that. We had a good ball club the year before, but in 1967 we had an outstanding club.”
Soileau had coached the Trojans to an 11-2 record and were one win away from a state title the season before, but they lost in the state semi-finals to Arcadia. The team followed it up with a 13-1 record in 1967.
“We had the same ball club we had the year before,” Soileau said. “We didn’t do much passing. We were mostly a running club. We had some good running backs and had some good blockers, so we stuck with the running. We threw the ball once in a while. Gary Inhern was our quarterback. He would throw the ball and complete most of his passes.”
“The thing about it is we didn’t need to pass because we were getting three to five yards a crack,” he added. “James Davenport was our fullback, and we had some good blockers on the line. We just went from one game to the other, and we had our scout Ted Lemoine at the other games watching the people that we were going to play the following week.”
Lemoine had played at Sacred Heart for Soileau a few years before the championship season. “I think people forget how good of a coach Bobby Soileau was,” he said. “I really believe he was a genius on defense. He knew everything about the whole game.”
A couple of the players attributed the success of those two years to different reasons. One reason, according to Perrodin, was the amount of practice time.
“We missed one day of practice from August 15 to December 16, and it was one Saturday on the opening day of Squirrel Season,” he said. “That was the only day we missed throughout the season.”
Soileau said about the practice time, “I’ll never forget the times that we ran the sprints, and I’ll never forget the times that we had to practice on Saturday mornings after a Friday night football game and some time on Sunday afternoons after Mass.”
According to Inhern and Aswell, the team’s success was from the toughness that the players learned from their coach. “First of all we never had water breaks, and that made us pretty tough,” Inhern said.
“Coach Bobby is a legend in Louisiana,” Aswell said. “He’s a legend because he was a great coach and also because of his boxing career. Boxers are taught not to drink water because they have to weigh in, so he just carried that onto the football field.”
The 1967 season started with a 6-0 loss to the Academy of the Immaculate Conception. “When we played AIC, Coach Soileau had put on a pro split offense that probably was not fit for what we were doing because originally we played a Wing-T,” Inhern said. “That game we played that particular offense, and it looked like it just did not fit. I think Coach Soileau knew that, so we went back to what made us great the years before.”
“After the AIC loss, Coach gave us a talk,” Perrodin said. “After that talk it was like everybody looked at each other and said we were not going to lose another game, and that was it. We didn’t lose another game.”
According to Aswell, the most important game of the regular season was a district game against Cottonport. “We played them for Homecoming, and we weren’t quite focused,” he said. “Our defense was usually pretty dominate, but Cottonport scored about 20 points on us that game.”
Sacred Heart went on to run the gamut and finished the season undefeated after the opening week loss to AIC. The Trojans then beat Newellton in the playoffs and beat Kentwood in the semi-finals. “We didn’t win the state championship when we beat Sicily Island,” Inhern said. “We won the state championship when we beat Kentwood the week before. They were probably the toughest team we faced. They were more athletic than we were, but we had the will to win.”
“We had a drive right at the end of the game with about three minutes to go,” he added. “Kentwood was beating us 13-7. We drove the ball down the field running draws and maybe a sweep. We might have thrown one or two passes. We eventually got to the end zone with hardly no time left. We kicked the extra point and beat them 14-13.”
Perrodin said, “After the game the Kentwood coach came in our dressing room in the old gym and told us that we had just won the state championship because they had beaten Sicily Island at the end of the year.”
“Kentwood the week before had put St. James out of the playoffs, and St. James had won the state championship the year before that,” LeBlanc said. “St. James was supposed to be unbeatable. Kentwood put them out of the playoffs, and we put Kentwood out of it. We came out of nowhere.”
The state finals was at Sicily Island on a foggy December night. The game would later become known as “The Fog Bowl.”
“The field was not in very good shape, plus they scored the first six points,” Soileau said. “We just got together after that and said let’s go out there and play our game. That was the only points they scored, and we won 20-6.”
Aswell, who was a senior that season in 1967, said the most important thing about playing football for Coach Soileau at Sacred Heart was lessons learned.
Aswell said, “There’s so many lessons learned in football that you will never learn in any other sport. Most of our class was very successful in life, and it’s hard to imagine anyone else who had influenced more people in Ville Platte than Coach Bobby Soileau.”