Scooter Hobbs column: Iowa put the whole parish on its back

Published 1:44 am Saturday, December 13, 2025

OK, Calcasieu, you can show your football face once more. It’s safe to come out in public again.

The chains have been lifted.

This parish has — are you sitting down? — a high school football state champion.

After all these years, a few near-misses and numerous heartaches, lift up your arms, toss those chins straps to the cheap seats, fling your helmets on high. Iowa High School is your 2025 Louisiana Non-select Division II state champion.

Iowa High 50, North DeSoto 43.

Crank up the juke box at Rabideaux’s!  

The Yellow Jackets will soon be home from the Caesars Superdome, big trophy in hand.

And can the rest of Calcasieu ride your coattails in joy … and relief? Maybe genuflect in your victorious aura?

It was as wild, crazy and exhilarating as the score might indicate.

And not a year too soon.

The school and the town which makes the high school its community focal point, is on the map.

Outsiders might wish to know that the town — and by association, the school — is pronounced “Eye-oh-way, not “Eye-uh-wuh” like some corn-fed outpost in the Midwest.

It may have taken a mapmaker with a sense of humor to put Iowa in Calcasieu Parish. The designers had to fashion a little keystone notch in the next parish over on the west side to slip it in.

Otherwise Friday would have been just another Jeff Davis Parish state championship like the recent ones a few miles down I-10.

Calcasieu needed it far worse.

How long had it been? Way too long, that’s what.

“I’ve been waiting on this for a long, long time,” said Iowa wide receiver Jeremiah Bushnell, who led the way with four touchdowns, three on receptions, another rushing.

He was hardly alone. Caston Lewis ran for 172 yards and two touchdowns, which still left enough time for J’Vien Adams to rush for 158 and another score.

Young Bushnell, a Houston signee, likely has no idea how long others have waited. Calcasieu’s last title celebration was actually in 1972, to be exact, by W.O. Boston High, which doesn’t even exist anymore.

For most on the ensuing 53 fallow years, Iowa would not have been a likely candidate for the breakthrough. In fact, there were long stretches where the Yellow Jackets were mostly the parish’s outmanned whipping boy.

But the school and the town have actually been building for this success for a while.

It’s the classic tale. It seems like Iowa, the town, went to bed one night — no one can pinpoint the exact date but sometime early this century— as a sleepy farming town and woke up the next morning as a bustling bedroom community for a Lake Charles workforce with a growing high school.

Those are usually good matches for high school football. North DeSoto benefits from the same formula with Shreveport.

And what a game those two put on. Anybody who watched it on streaming TV, let alone is person, is surely out of breath.

Maybe it wasn’t the best game in comparison to the parish’s long-ago state title games — purists generally prefer some defense with their football fare.

But surely it was among the wildest and they’re all playing for second when it comes to pure entertainment.

It was a game with 1,007 yards, with punts an afterthought in the midst of roughly 219 momentum swings.

It was a game where Iowa probably needed to, and did go 5-for-5 on fourth-down gambles, if you can call them that, just to survive North DeSota’s relentless offense.

Iowa was forced — or so it appeared — to play North DeSota’s game, which basically needs a video game console.

It was one of those games where it’s not about stopping your opponent — not really happening — but a matter of can you keep up.

Iowa’s improved domestic demographics apparently don’t include a place kicker. The Yellow Jackets didn’t even have one on the roster and the win might have been far easier if they’d picked one up at a garage sale on the way to New Orleans.

Having to go for two basically evened out, but it hurt most when the first half ended with the ‘Jackets in point-blank but forced to throw (unsuccessfully) instead of kick an easy field goal.

Trickier still, in a game of keep-up, it didn’t help the Yellow Jackets that the Griffins, when they needed an answer for another Iowa quick strike, always seemed to be starting in Yellow Jackets’ territory, or nearabouts, after the kickoff.

Nobody will remember that.

No, indeed.

Affectionately sometimes known as “Exit 43,” (on I-10) there’s suddenly a lot more than rice and crawfish fields to brag about now.

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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics for the American Press. Contact him at scooter.hobbs@americanpress.com