Colonels get ‘miracle’ weekend with sweep, lots of help around Southland
May 23, 2018
Richard Autin
May 23, 2018
This was a historic year for South Lafourche High School athletics.
The volleyball team made the Pontchartrain Center for the first-time ever. The baseball team won its first-ever playoff games, making it to the Class 4A State Quarterfinals. The Lady Tarpons’ girls’ basketball made the Top 28 and boys’ basketball, football, track and field, swimming and softball each enjoyed postseason successes, as well.
But for as bright as the immediate past has been in Tarpon Land, a look into the future shows that there’s likely many, many more days of sunshine ahead.
The Larose-Cut Off Middle School Bulldogs had a historic athletic year with the girls’ basketball, volleyball and track and field teams all winning Lafourche Parish Championships – the first time in school history that that’s ever occurred for the three sports in one year.
Five student-athletes – Ava Pitre, Madison Ryan, Madelyn Bourgeois, Abbi Collins and Logan Cheramie – were members of all three teams and they and their coaches both said this week that they take great pride in their successes and look forward to their future together as Lady Tarpons.
“The future is very bright for all of these girls,” said Molly Bourgeois, the volleyball and girls’ basketball coach at LCO. “I have watched these girls grow up together and have seen them grow in all aspects of their lives. … These girls are true champions in every sense of the word.”
Togetherness and unity are two traits that the girls on the teams tout has allowed them to prosper.
Of course, talent helps, too and LCO has a lot of that running through its halls.
The athletic year started with volleyball – a sport that’s just now becoming a year-round youth sport for kids down in Lafourche.
And their talent is showing through.
LCO entered the year hungry. They’d finished as the parish runners-up for two-straight years entering 2017.
The Lady Bulldogs’ nemesis in the past had been E.D. White – a team which had been a thorn in LCO’s side. Bourgeois said she challenged her team throughout the season to work hard and be the best version of themselves so that they’d be ready for the matchup with the Lady Cardinals.
LCO’s hunger showed when the day of the match came. The Lady Bulldogs won the first two sets and stormed out to an advantage.
E.D. White won the third set to draw close, but LCO slammed the door shut in the fourth set to seal the win – a moment that everyone involved said jump-started all of the successes which happened after.
LCO also beat Lockport the next week after beating E.D. White to clinch the parish title.
“We went up by a few points and I started to tear up with the thought that these girls were going to do this,” Bourgeois admits. “And they did.”
“We wanted to end our volleyball career at LCO by winning that Parish Championship and we did it,” Madelyn Bourgeois added.
Next came basketball for the Lady Bulldogs – a sport where LCO is a bit of a power.
Bourgeois said this group of kids has been playing basketball together since they were 7-years-old and they’ve enjoyed success at every, level, including winning the Parish Championship in 2016-17.
LCO repeated this year, which wasn’t a huge surprise to locals because the team returned several starters off the unit which had won the title the year before.
But LCO wasn’t just a local act. They traveled the state and competitive favorable, including a runner-up finish in a prestigious tournament at Walker – an event which featured some of the top teams in Louisiana. The Lady Bulldogs beat Lockport to secure the title, then also beat Evergreen in a cross-parish game.
In total, the championship repeat was sweet, according to Pitre and others on the squad.
“We are all true friends,” Pitre said. “We were true teammates and a true team.”
“Basketball was my favorite (of the three),” Collins said. “We had a great group of girls and we all worked great together and we were always there for each other.”
And then, there was the championship track season.
Girls’ track coach Celeste Breaux said she knew that winning a parish championship would be tough because West Thibodaux has dominated the Lafourche middle school track scene for more than a decade.
“I knew I had my work cut out for me,” Breaux said. “I knew we needed to accumulate as many points as possible in all areas of track and field.”
The Lady Bulldogs did just that.
Combining points from the full allotment of events, LCO won the majority of its meets, including the Parish Championships where they accumulated 113 points total – 29 more than the runners-up.
Seventh grader Gemi Detillier won the Track MVP for all of the meets in the season, while Abbi Collins and Madison Ryan were huge performers in the field.
“We worked at every practice, moving positions on relay teams, inviting all girls to throw the javelin or having all girls attempt the high jump to see if we had some hidden talents,” Breaux said. “And that we did.”
So now, it’s time for the girls to trade in their maroon for Tarpon blue.
Several of the girls said they plan to play all of the same sports at South Lafourche and both Bourgeois and Breaux said they think the young ladies have chances to enjoy the same successes at high school that they did at LCO.
But no matter how it all turns out, this group said they take pride in knowing that they’ll be competing together.
“Now, we are becoming Tarpons,” Collins said. “It will be different because now, we’re the young ones again. But that just means we have to do better to prove we can stick with the older girls.”
“We completed our goal of getting Parish Champs in all three sports,” Madelyn Bourgeois added. “Now, hopefully, we will have as much fun and success at South – just like we did at LCO.”
Follow Casey on Twitter for more.
https://twitter.com/casey_gisclair
