While Kansas’ high school football playoffs are underway, Louisiana is playing the final week of its high school football regular season this weekend. It actually ends today with a few games in the New Orleans area, including my alma mater, Brother Martin, playing Archbishop Rummel at East Jefferson High School’s Joe Yenni Stadium.

Saturday high school football games in the Big Easy are common, especially for Catholic high schools. There are many more schools than available stadiums in the New Orleans metropolitan area, and teams must participate in a lottery for dates they want to host. The prime slot, obviously, is Friday night, but more often than not, schools must opt to play Thursday night, or Saturday, whether it be in the afternoon or evening.

Brother Martin is one of those schools which often plays on Saturday. The Crusaders use one of two stadiums located in New Orleans’ City Park, Tad Gormley and Pan American, as their home field, and thus must jockey with other schools for available dates. Last week, the Crusaders hosted Jesuit at Tad Gormley on Saturday.

The two Catholic high schools in Jefferson Parsih, Archbishop Rummel in Metairie and Archbishop Shaw in Marrero, NEVER get to use the stadiums at East Jefferson and West Jefferson, respectively, on Friday nights, save for the playoffs when the Jefferson Parish public school teams are either out of the playoffs or on the road.

Rummel has the land to build its own stadium, but instead makes the 10-minute drive on West Metairie Avenue to Joe Yenni, which has seating for nearly 10,000 and a Field Turf playing surface. Shaw has its own baseball field but has opted against building a football stadium around its existing practice field, instead driving through the Harvey Tunnel to West Jeff’s Hoss Memtsas Stadium, which is an exact copy of Joe Yenni.

Both Joe Yenni and Hoss Memtsas have spectacular press box views. At Yenni, you can see the Huey P. Long Bridge across the Mississippi River to the south, and at Memtsas, you can see traffic on the West Bank Expressway to the south, and downtown New Orleans to the northwest.