All eyes from football fans across the state will be focused on Saturday’s high school football showdown inside the Caesars Superdome as the Ruston Bearcats travel to New Orleans to take on the Edna Karr Cougars.
To say it is destined to be genuine greatness — something truly special — is unmistakable for any football fanatic living in Louisiana.
Simply put, it’s going to be historic.
Double, or maybe triple, that feeling for me.
You see, I grew up in Algiers — the West Bank portion of the city of New Orleans where Karr High School is located.
In fact, the recently constructed new Edna Karr is located across a four-lane highway, maybe a half-block at most, from the house I spent the vast majority of my youth growing up in. If I could look northward outside one of the two windows of the second-story bedroom I grew up in, I would be able to clearly see the new Edna Karr building.
Behind that, I would be able to see ships traveling across the Mississippi River when the water is high, or the suburb of Chalmette beyond that on the other side of the river.
But in my day — the mid-1970s — Edna Karr was a junior high school.
And I was proud to wear the purple and gold colors that came with being a Cougar.
Karr was still a powerhouse even then, but it was a junior high. I was a Karr Cougar for the 1976-77 and 1977-78 academic years before moving on to O. Perry Walker High School to become a Charger. The Cougars won city football championships both seasons I attended Karr.
The school transitioned to become a high school in late 1990. The Cougars won state championships in 1993 and 2012 before dominating Class 4A from 2016-19, winning four state titles in the process.
In recent years, Karr has returned to dominance, winning back-to-back Division I Select School championships in 2024-25.
Coaches with ties to Lincoln Parish helped Karr to that later era of prep dominance. Jabbar Juluke, who served as running backs coach for Louisiana Tech for the 2013-15 seasons, was head coach in the 2000s and early 2010s.
And Brice Brown, a Grambling State University product, has guided the Cougars to eight state championship games, winning six of those contests along the way.
After taking over the Edna Karr program in 2015, Brown has recorded a 130-17 coaching record heading into Saturday’s game against Ruston.
My true love for Ruston High School has never been a secret and, I believe, is quite well known here in Lincoln Parish. My father, Thomas Wayne Boatright, played for the Bearcats with Chick Childress and is in multiple photos at RHS and the Jimmy “Chick” Childress Field House as a member of the 1947 state championship team.
I was in the Superdome in 1982 as a freshman at LSU, sitting beside my dad and watching the Bearcats win their first football state title since 1951.
My daughters have both graduated from Ruston High, with our youngest — Jessie — earning a 2023 championship ring as a four-year member of the football team’s film crew.
And it’s no secret I have spent many, many seasons covering and taking photos of the Bearcats as a local sports journalist going as far back as the mid- to late 1980s.
So, believe me when I say I truly and proudly consider myself a Ruston Bearcat.
At the same time, I am proudly a Karr Cougar, just as I am a Charger from O. Perry Walker, a school that has not existed since 2020. In 2013, O. Perry Walker merged with L.B. Landry, another high school on the West Bank of New Orleans, as Landry-Walker High School.
In 2020, the Algiers Charter School Board voted to officially drop “Walker” from the latter school’s name due to the namesake’s historical support for segregation.
Oliver Perry Walker was a New Orleans public school superintendent who actively opposed the integration of public schools and supported segregationist policies.
Ironically, O. Perry Walker opened in 1970 as integration had taken full effect in New Orleans. I know because I remember seeing the changes happening around me in my early school years.
And in fact, the first live-action football game I ever saw was at Behrman Stadium, cheering on the Behrman High School Bees.
That school was situated right down the street from O. Perry Walker and became an elementary school when O. Perry Walker High School opened as part of the New Orleans integration movement.
I know that’s a lot of history. But it also explains that not only is the Ruston-Edna Karr game an incredible matchup of recent powerhouses — it’s also a part of history, especially for me.
And I, for one, can’t wait for the opening kickoff.
