LOREAUVILLE — Two words that haven’t been used to describe Loreauville football in 11 years have a nice ring to them. District champions.

Behind four touchdowns from Evan Simon and a defensive effort that allowed just one score, the Loreauville Tigers claimed no worse than a share of the District 7-2A championship with a 31-13 win over Ascension Episcopal Friday night,

“That feels good,” Simon said. “That sounds good too.”

With the win, Loreauville moves to 9-0 overall and 5-0 in district with one game left against Jeanerette. If the Tigers win next week, they will finish the regular season with a perfect 10-0 mark for the first time since 1998. With a 5-0 district mark, the Tigers claim their first district title since 2010. Even with a loss next week, the Tigers would still share the district title and would still be outright district champs if Ascension loses to West St. Mary Thursday night.

“If you win the district championship you’re an automatic qualifier but because of power points, there really isn’t a lot of emphasis on it anymore,” Loreauville coach Terry Martin said. “But when you win one, it matters.

“I’ve been around long enough to know it doesn’t happen all the time. I am very thankful for it and I’m very thankful for this group of seniors. Their freshman year, they lost nine games in a row and they won their last game of the season.

“I had some of the best comments from them after the season about how much fun they had even though they didn’t win a lot of games. To see that group come from that to win it outright, I’m very proud of them.”

Surprisingly, it was a junior who had the best night for the Tigers.

Simon had touchdown runs of 5, 7, 5 and 11 yards and finished with 120 yards rushing.

“I believe in my team,” he said. “We were trying to make a statement. People said that we didn’t play anyone good. We played someone good tonight and beat them.”

Simon gave credit to the offensive line for opening the holes for him to run through.

While Simon had a big night scoring, a senior, quarterback Calep Jacob, did some damage too with 176 yards rushing, including an 11-yard touchdown run, and completed eight of 10 passes for 97 yards.

Loreauville finished with 406 yards of offense.

“It took a good team to bring all of that offense out of us,” Simon said.

The other story of the game was Loreauville’s defense. The Tigers held an Ascension Episcopal team to 106 yards of offense, forced four fumbles, had two interceptions and held a team that had been scoring more than 30 points a game, including 66 last week against Franklin, to one offensive touchdown.

“It was a good night for the defense,” senior Nick Deal, who had two pass break-ups in the game, said. “We played hard, we got the stops.

“We practiced pass scales all week long to prepare for them.”

Martin and the LHS coaching staff took a chance against AES and it paid off.

“We knew coming into the game that their quarterback, if we let him set his feet and throw, was going to kill us. So we decided to put pressure on him and we played man coverage.

“They still broke free sometimes and had open receivers but we were lucky in that the ball hit the ground on most of them. Still, that’s the big issue when you blitz, if someone misses a receiver or slips, then it’s a touchdown for them.”

The end result, though, was a win and a district title for the Tigers, who aren’t finished yet.

“We still have a lot more to accomplish,” Simon said. “We’re not done yet.”