Jeanerette's Kelby Guillory (11) shoots over Kylen Chretien of Catholic High on Friday.

Talk about a game of halves.

The first half of Friday night’s District 7-2A contest between Catholic High and Jeanerette was all JHS.

Playing stout defense, the Tigers held Catholic High to 18 points and erupted to a 30-18 lead at the break.

But in the second half, it was all Catholic High.

The Panthers shut out Jeanerette in the third quarter and held the Tigers to 12 second half points, blowing past JHS to a 51-42 win to improve to 6-7 overall and 3-3 in district.

“It’s been quite a while since we didn’t allow a team to score a point in a quarter,” CHS coach Josh Guilbeau said. “If we have an identity as a team its on the defensive side.of the ball.

“We’ve had some games where we played pretty well defensively but that was by far our best defensive performance. Zero points in the third quarter, only 3 points midway through the fourth quarter and 12 points total in the second half.”

Guilbeau said his team did a great job of creating turnovers and had a lot better effort in the second half than in the first half.

“I told them that’s not us. We told them at halftime I thought that was the one thing that was missing,” Guilbeau said. “We had opportunities offensively that we didn’t take advantage of but that’s not what we hang our hats on as a team and in the second half we were able to get some turnovers and some easy buckets.”

KK Reno led Catholic High with 18 points while Hiram Eugene added 10 points and Trace Williams had 7 for the Panthers.

“Even when we were down by 12 at halftime, we didn’t panic,” Guilbeau said. “We’ve been down before and we’ve come back in the second half and we did that again tonight.”

On the other side of the court, it was a strange game for Jeanerette coach Dwayne Alexander.

His Tigers did everything right in the first half in building a big lead, and then couldn’t do anything in the second half.

“I have to give it to my younger kids, they played well in the first half,” the JHS coach said. “We played perfect defense in the first half. I mean we held them to 18 points in the first half.

“It got away from us in the second half. We didn’t have a point guard and they forced us into some turnovers. If we have our point guard, it’s a different game. But we’re not a high-scoring team and as a young team, we run into problems like that. We just need a leader to take control when the going gets tough. They took advantage of a short-handed team but my guys played well. We’re getting better and better each game.”

Richard Lumpkin led Jeanerette with 13 points while Kelby Guillory finished with 10 points.