VILLE PLATTE — After 20 years of coaching football, Church Point coach Rob Pool thought he had seen just about everything the game could throw at him. Then gunfire erupted near the field during Friday night’s game at Ville Platte.
With Church Point leading the Ville Platte Bulldogs 14-0 with about nine minutes remaining in the second quarter, officials stopped play to discuss a penalty.
During the stoppage, one of Pool’s assistant coaches told him “something is going on over there.”
Seconds later, Pool saw players, coaches and managers on the Bulldogs’ sideline running toward the locker room.
“All of the kids are running. Their bench started running toward the locker room, so we just followed suit because you don’t know what’s going on in that situation,” Pool said.
The commotion followed a shooting behind the stands on the home side of the stadium that left one person dead and two others injured.
Pool said he initially did not hear gunshots. Instead, he and his team reacted to seeing people fleeing the area.
“I didn’t hear any gunshots initially,” he said. “You can hear them on the people’s recordings, but we didn’t hear anything. We just knew everybody was vacating their side, so we did the same thing.”
In that moment, Pool said, the priority was getting everyone away from potential danger.
“You don’t really know if it is something really going on that’s serious or is it just a knee-jerk reaction when somebody’s running, you just run,” he said. “We live in a society where this stuff is not uncommon and stuff happens all the time. So, you just have to get everybody away from whatever’s going on and then figure it out later.”
Church Point’s visitors locker room is located beneath the stands on its side of the field, so the Church Point team did not have far to go to reach safety, Pool said. The team followed the emergency procedures discussed before the game and got its spirit groups back onto buses.
The Louisiana High School Athletic Association requires schools to hold a pregame administrative conference to discuss safety procedures and other game-day matters.
“In that meeting, you go over emergency action plans if something happens,” Pool said. “You just get everybody to their locker rooms and get everybody out of harm’s way. So, as soon as we had the issue we just went ahead and followed that. We knew where we were going, and we got our spirit groups back on the buses.”
Pool said he did not hear players discussing the incident afterward and did not notice anyone visibly shaken.
The game was declared a no-contest and will not be resumed or rescheduled, leaving both Church Point and Ville Platte with nine games on their schedules.
For Pool, the decision was secondary to the safety of the players and others at the game.
“It doesn’t really matter,” he said of losing a game from the schedule. “We just move on to the next week.”
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