Turnovers foil Kaplan's efforts in playoff at Jennings

JENNINGS — The Kaplan High Pirates moved the ball the way they wanted to in the first half of their Non-Select Division II playoff opener at Jennings on Friday, but turned the ball over three times and trailed 21-0 at halftime.
Jennings went on to a 34-6 win over the Pirates, ending Kaplan’s season at 7-4 overall.
Though the game didn’t turn out the way Kaplan hoped, head coach Cory Brodie said the team’s five seniors — Gabriel Campisi, Jed Devoltz, Talan Fruge, André Marceaux and Grant Stelly — laid the groundwork for the future team, especially with the example they set for the younger players.
“I’m super proud of the five seniors we had, not only on the football field, but guys who are always here,” Brodie said. “They’re the first people at practice. They never felt a job was too small for them. They set up the field for us. They took out the trash. Just five really good people that our younger guys can look up to.
“It kind of sucks for them that it was just five of them, because when we do progress in the future, a lot of our success is going to be because of what those guys showed the younger guys — even though we’re seniors, we’re going to do the little things every day to get better. A lot of them were leaders by example.”
Though KHS moved the ball early, turnovers kept them out of the end zone.
“We had the offense going in the first half,” Brodie said. “We got the ball inside the 30 three times, we just fumbled the ball. We fumbled three times. We thought out of those four drives we had the opportunity to score on three of them.”
Jed Devoltz scored the Pirates’ lone touchdown with 3:12 left in the game.
“We were kind of banged up,” Brodie said. “Carter Petry, our tight end, ended up going out. Kevin Small, our nose guard, ended up getting out. Our starting center sprained his ankle. Daylon Landry, our 1,000-yard rusher, didn’t play tonight. He had a pretty bad quad bruise.
“It was just kind of the wrong time to get banged up and the wrong time to have turnovers — on top of playing a good Jennings team that was hitting on all cylinders.”
Expectations will be high in the future after Kaplan turned around from a 4-6 year to a 7-3 regular season, the coach said.
“We’re going to go from exceeding expectations to trying to reach expectations when they’re super high, so that’s going to be the big battle this offseason, and we’re going to see how we respond to it.”
Though the season didn’t end the way the team wanted it to, Brodie said he thinks it was a successful season, and he’s proud of the senior class.
“Hopefully that’s a foundation of where we are, at 7-3, and we’ll build on that,” he said.