LIVINGSTON – Football is back at Doyle High School, and Blane Westmoreland is out of retirement.
Doyle High announced the return of football after a 40-year hiatus at the school’s football alumni breakfast on campus Wednesday morning, with Westmoreland as the program’s head coach.
The school will be playing a junior varsity schedule beginning next season. There are also plans for a stadium and field house to be built in the near future.
The school’s last team went 0-10 in 1986, and the program was disbanded.
“It’s so unique to kind of be in this position and bring football back to a town that for the latter decade has really wanted it,” Westmoreland said, noting the plan is to move to a varsity schedule by 2030.
“When you and I last talked, it was I’m going to go be a dad,” Westmoreland, a former head coach at Albany and Live Oak, continued. “I’m going to help (former Albany football coach John) Legoria a little bit, and I’m just going to hang out and be a dad, and that’s going to be OK with me, and it was.”
Things changed just before the start of the 2024-25 school year, when Westmoreland talked with Doyle principal Ashley Sharp, who said she was looking for an administrative assistant and wanted to explore the idea of bringing football back to the school.
That’s when the wheels started turning, and Westmoreland decided to accept a new the new role at Doyle.
“How cool would it be to build an entire program from the ground up? We all talk about building programs. Well, most all of us build a program, well, there’s already a building,” Westmoreland said. “You already have a football field. You actually have footballs. You have football players. You might not have a lot of them. You might not have a lot of equipment, but you’ve got something.”
With that in mind, Westmoreland has taken his own approach to bringing back football at Doyle.
“This is a marathon, not a sprint,” he said. “You have to understand this is a long game, and you have to play it as such. There’s going to be things that, if this was five, 10 years down the road, no, we wouldn’t do it this way … but because it’s year one, year two, and now with high school football going back to being year one, we have to do certain things certain ways.”
One of the big challenges Westmoreland faced was selling students on playing football, especially knowing some had never played the game. He said that part of the equation took care of itself as he built relationships with those students after he came to Doyle. He noted his original sixth-grade students are now eighth-graders.
“It makes it easier for them to want to come play because you’ve built that relationship,” Westmoreland said. “We made it a point to really focus on those fifth-graders to try to build that relationship with those kids that are now in seventh grade and to get those kids out.”
Another challenge was getting equipment necessary to play football.
“We didn’t even have a football,” he said. “You have no equipment, so we’ve got to go get jerseys and shoulder pads and helmets and practice pants and practice tops, and, hey, we need dummies, and we need tackle wheels, and we need a camera to film. You have to get all these things, and then you’re trying to explain to the community, ‘Hey look, one helmet is this much money. A jersey is this much, and one football is 80 bucks. If we do it right, it’s going to last us for a few weeks, but if it rains, you can throw that football into the practice bag and there goes 80 bucks, and that’s just for a junior high football. A high school football is $100.”
Westmoreland said Southside Junior High coach Josh Neal and Denham Springs Junior High coach Mitch Covington have been helpful in providing guidance with equipment and uniforms.
Additionally, Westmoreland said a temporary building on campus was converted into a locker room. He said the school recently updated its weight room with more weights and racks while making it more functional for all the school’s athletes. Westmoreland said Denham Springs baseball coach Craig Castello was helpful in that process.
Doyle started playing football at the junior high level last season with one team made up of sixth, seventh and eighth-graders.
This season, the program played nine games with the eighth-grade team and eight games with the sixth-and-seventh grade team. The sixth-and-seventh-graders won five games, while the eighth-graders have won three games heading into a game Wednesday evening.
“We’ve played a lot of football, and we’ve had a lot of kids play a lot of football,” Westmoreland said. “My mentality was I’ve never had a parent complain and say, ‘Man, my kid is playing too much.’ So my idea was play. Do we have an eighth-grade game? OK. Does the school we play have enough kids to play a sixth and seventh-grade JV game an hour before? It doesn’t have to be much structured but let us be on the field. Let us teach our kids. Let us get some reps.”
“We look a lot different,” Westmoreland said regarding the team’s progress from year one to year two. “We’ve got a long way to go, but we are way ahead of where we were.”
Doyle has played at False River and played a game in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome.
“I think we’re the only parish school still playing, but it’s all by design to give these kids more opportunities to play the game to learn the game, which only benefits us moving forward in high school,” Westmoreland said.
Westmoreland called the Doyle football job ‘the best football job in Livingston Parish.’
“I know we’re the newest football program and we don’t have a football tradition, but nobody else controls football sixth through 12th (grades) but Doyle High School,” Westmoreland said, noting offensive and defensive systems often change as players move from junior high to high school. “There’s no middle man.”
“We’re wing-T,” Westmoreland continued. “I’ve got sixth-graders running 36G and understand how to pull and understand our offense and understand our calls, and this is what this means. They understand our special teams calls. They understand what we mean when we call this and that. That’s what makes it so unique and different than the other jobs is the high school coach at Doyle, he’s the football guy.”
Westmoreland said community support has been key in getting the ball rolling on football, noting the roles Livingston Mayor Jonathan Taylor, school board member Brad Sharp and others have played.
“Where do you have this type of support and this type of buy-in from everybody? From the mayor, to the aldermen to your entire administrative team,” Westmoreland said. “But that’s what makes it’s so special. That’s what I love. It’s small-town football. The whole town is there. There’s nothing else to contend with.”
The program has played its home games at Southeastern Louisiana University’s Strawberry Stadium over the past two seasons, and Westmoreland said SLU football coach Frank Scelfo and his players have played a big part in helping the team as well.
“Those guys have opened it up, and they have been great, and we wouldn’t be where we are if it wasn’t for those guys of helping us out and really being able to use their facility,” Westmoreland said.
“It’s hard to beat being able to play in Strawberry Stadium as an 11, 12, 13-year-old, being able to walk into that, see the college athletes on the field practicing and then get out there and play your game,” Westmoreland continued. “That’s just been so cool for them to be able to see that, play on that field.”
Westmoreland said the Doyle field house will have about a 4,000 square foot weight room, with locker rooms for varsity and junior high teams, high school and junior high coaches’ offices, training room, storage for uniforms, film room, a lobby with a player’s lounge and an entrance lobby. Concession stands and bathrooms will be attached. He said a track will be added at the stadium in a later phase.
There will also be a dedicated area in the field house for the school’s cheerleaders to practice.
“That was important to me,” he said. “Yes, it’s going to be called the football field house, but it’s going to be utilized by every athlete.”
Westmoreland said getting back into coaching football at Doyle has been a challenge in a good way.
“It has been a whirlwind, but the last two years, it’s a lot of work, but it’s been a rewarding experience,” Westmoreland said. “It has brought the passion for football back to me and just being able to be around the kids. They’ve been amazing just learning the game because they’ve never played.”
