One yard short
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The closest Vicknair came to a state championship as a head coach was Dec. 12, 1980. Barbe lost 15-8 to East St. John in Cowboy Stadium at McNeese. The next year, the Louisiana High School Athletic Association began putting all football state championship games in the Superdome.
East St. John, coached by Phil Greco and led by quarterback Timmy Byrd, scored in the second and third quarters for a 15-0 lead. Barbe scored on a 7-yard pass from Doug Quienalty to Randy Edwards, and tailback Scott Ayres squeezed over for the two-point conversion that made it a one-possession game with 4:35 left.
A little more than a minute later, the Bucs turned an East St. John fumble into one more chance on offense. Barbe reached the 4-yard line, and on fourth-and-goal, the Bucs ran the bootleg pass.
“Doug fakes and cuts back around and looks for the open man in the end zone,” Vicknair told the Lake Charles American Press after the game.
Quienalty couldn’t find an open man, and he saw open space and headed toward the goal line.
“I thought he was going to make it,” Vicknair repeatedly told the newspaper.
Shaver, the offensive coordinator, remembered calling that play from the press box.
“Backside F option,” he said. “Doug Quienalty had the opportunity to get it in or pitch, and he thought he could get it in. That linebacker made an unbelievable tackle at the goal line.”
The American Press credited Wade Delaneuville and Fred Cook with stopping Quienalty just short of the goal line. Shaver said the player most responsible for the tackle broke his nose on the play.
“I mean, Doug is going in,” Shaver said, recalling how the play unfolded in front of him as he watched from the Cowboy Stadium press box. “I’m telling you, he is going in. I’m on the phone, on the headset upstairs, and I’m saying, ‘He’s in. He’s in. He’s in.’
“Unbelievable. That guy jacked him up and put him down on the 1. He is leaning forward, he is going in.”
Shaver said Quienalty made a good decision. The newspaper quoted Vicknair as saying the same thing.
“He did the only thing he could,” Vicknair said. “He looked like he could get in there.”
East St. John walked away with a perfect 14-0 record. Barbe finished 14-1.
One loss. One yard short.
Vicknair had already decided to go for two points — to win the game or lose it — if the Bucs scored at the end.
Shaver looked back fondly on that season. Ayres, who rushed for more than 2,000 yards, was “phenomenal.” Bruchhaus ran a defense that didn’t have a lot of size but excelled at stopping opposing offenses.
“Winning 14 straight was special,” Shaver said 29 years later, still waiting to coach in another state championship game.
Bruchhaus was on the coaching staff at Northeast Louisiana University in 1987 when the Indians won the Division I-AA national championship. Pat Collins, the head coach, told Bruchhaus it’s not about coaching, it’s about recruiting.
“You win if you have the players,” Bruchhaus said, adding that’s something people should keep in mind about Vicknair’s career.
“We played with good players,” Bruchhaus said of their days at Barbe, “and we coached them up. I think when you get to the top, then you coach them up, but you’d better have the players or you’re not going to get to the top.”
It was during those years Shaver realized what good friends Charles Vicknair was with Nolan Viator, the friend he replaced as coach of the Bucs, and how much Vicknair trusted Viator’s opinion about offenses.
“Vic was a defensive guy,” Shaver said. “Nolan was an offensive guy.”
Not just an offensive guy, but one who learned from Faize Mahfouz, whose innovations still influences coaches and their teams.
“Faize Mahfouz could spend two days talking about the center snap,” Shaver said, chuckling as he said he could probably talk for about two minutes on the same subject.
That kind of thoroughness rubbed off on Nolan Viator. Shaver first came in close contact with him while a student teacher at Barbe, during Viator’s time as head coach of the Bucs. After Shaver worked as a St. Louis assistant and returned to Barbe to coach for Vicknair, Shaver discovered he had to run his offensive ideas past Viator. That was Vicknair’s idea.
“Even though Nolan was at another school, if he said something wasn’t good on offense, you didn’t do it,” Shaver said. “He was the authority.
“Back then, it just kind of hacked me off because I thought I had a good idea, but Nolan would just scratch it out. It kind of hacked me off, but looking back on it, he was right — absolutely, he was right, without a doubt. I’m glad I did have him to know that, because if I’m going to run the offense, hopefully I’m doing the right things.”
That became a Sunday morning ritual as Shaver prepared for Barbe’s next game.
Vicknair went on to coach at schools that didn’t have the players to get him back to the level of state championship contender. His only other experience coaching in a state championship game was as a Westlake assistant in 2007.
Getting to the top of the local district in the state’s highest classification wasn’t easy at Barbe. Sulphur, with longtime coach Shannon Suarez in charge, was the kingpin for much of the 1960s and ’70s.
“They outworked everybody,” Bruchhaus said. “They’re great people. Shannon molded a lot of lives.”
Bruchhaus said he’ll never forget the day Barbe finally beat Sulphur.
“I believe it took 10 years, but we beat them,” Bruchhaus said.
It didn’t take that long. Barbe opened in 1971, but it took a couple of years before the Bucs had a full complement of sophomore, junior and senior classes to compete at the varsity level.
The Bucs got their first victory against Sulphur in 1978, Vicknair’s first season at Barbe. The American Press called it Barbe’s “six-year war” to get the best of Sulphur. The score: 20-9.
Barbe shared the district championship with Lake Charles High.
“I can remember John Nicosia, who was the principal, getting in front of the whole school and crying when we beat them,” Bruchhaus said. “It was at a pep rally. It was a big thing.”
To have a rival, a measuring stick, is important, Bruchhaus said. Competition within a team’s roster, within its coaching staff and from school to school help raise the level of effort and push people to get better, he said.
Barbe decided it would have to outwork Sulphur to be better than Sulphur.
“We were going to do whatever it took to do that,” Bruchhaus said.
It helped that Vicknair hired good coaches, and Bruchhaus learned from that.
“Surround yourself with good people,” he said. “You can’t do it by yourself.”
Charles Vicknair and Nolan Viator went their entire coaching careers without winning a state championship. Matt Viator, who learned much of his trade from both of them, won one in his fourth season as a head coach, at 29 years old. Among the people he surrounded himself with, who helped him win the title long before that championship season, were his mentor and his father.
Jud Siebarth played at Barbe through that 1978 season and watched Vicknair turn the Bucs from a 2-8 program to a 10-3 team that made its first trip to the playoffs.
“My freshman year, they were 2-8,” Siebarth said. “That was 1976. In ‘77, they were terrible. They were 2-8. In ‘78, that’s when we went to the quarterfinals, and then my senior year, Ayres and all of them came along right behind us, and we won (a share of) district that year but didn’t go to the playoffs. The year after I left, they played for the state championship.”
Later in Vicknair’s career, others went deeper into the postseason, but Vicknair became known as someone who could put a program in the playoffs for the first time in a few years or longer.
“He was really good at salvaging programs, going to programs, rebuilding them, getting people involved, making money for the team and going first-class in everything, and getting them back going,” Shaver said. “He was really good at that. I thought he did that at several schools.”
Cody Vicknair was the last of three sons to play for his father at St. Louis High School. He talked about watching the oldest, Vic, experience a turnaround before graduating in 1997.
“Within one year he had that program turned around,” Cody said. “That was his niche, taking a program and changing it around, and he thrived off that.”
The size of the school or the classification — 5A, 4A, or whatever — didn’t matter. What mattered was making the team successful and seeing the pride and other changes in the faces of his players.
Siebarth said it was special to be part of the building of what has proved to be the most successful program in Southwest Louisiana in the decades since.
“We were there when it all started, when they got it going,” Siebarth said. “Coach Vicknair was a great coach. Kids loved him. He was like a dad to me. He was in and out of my life ever since junior high. As a matter of fact, I touched base with him about a week before he passed.
“We were going to go play golf. It just didn’t work out.”
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