Catholic High head football coach Brent Indest, center, talks with his team at practice Tuesday for the Panthers’ playoff game against St. Thomas Aquinas, set for Friday at CHS. The Panthers won a game between the teams earlier this season.

It’s not a word that many football coaches like to hear — rematch.

But that’s exactly what Catholic High faces Friday night as the sixth-seeded Panthers play No. 11 seed St. Thomas Aquinas in the first round of the LHSAA Division III playoffs.

Eight weeks ago, Catholic High rolled past STA 63-7 as the Panthers amassed more than 500 yards of offense and scored 42 first half points against the Falcons.

Peter LeBlanc scored three touchdowns, Zoe Cormier added two scores and Trey Amos had two touchdown passes and one rushing touchdown in the rout played at St. Thomas Aquinas in Hammond.

Now two months later, the Panthers play host to the Falcons in the first round of the playoffs with a trip to Baton Rouge and a second round date with Dunham on the line.

“The main reason I don’t like a rematch is that it’s fun to play someone different,” CHS coach Brent Indest said. “But ever since the spilt occurred, it’s one of the unfortunate ramifications of it.

“We played Newman three of the last four years. It’s just the world that we live in so you have to move on.”

According to Indest, while the game may be a rematch on paper, it’s definitely not a rematch on the field.

“We played them eight weeks ago and both teams have changed since then,” the CHS coach said. “You have to look at it as a completely different game now.”

Indest said that CHS does a lot of different things now that the team didn’t do the first time the two teams met.

‘We showed them basically one formation when we played them in week three,” Indest said. “Now we’re running up to 10 or 11 different formations and that’s what’s going to be different on our side.”

In the first game, Indest said, Trey Henry didn’t play because of injury, Cormier was playing hurt and a few others players were battling nagging injuries as well.

Two months later, Henry’s back, Cormier’s healthy and Marlon Brown is back after being sidelined for a couple of weeks with an injury.

“In fact, we’re coming into the game as healthy as we’ve ever been,” Indest said.

As for as the players go, it’s business as usual even though the stakes are ramped up because it’s a playoff game.

“I think we can’t take them lightly,” LeBlanc said. “It’s hard to beat a team twice so we’ll definitely have to bring our ‘A’ game and play like we’ve been playing all year.

“I think they’re going to do something tricky to keep us off balance but if we play our game we’ll be fine. We have to play them like we did the first time, we did pretty good against them in the first game.”

One thing the Panthers have to avoid is the temptation to look ahead to the second round contest with Dunham.

“There is the slight temptation to look ahead because it’s Dunham but we’re definitely not overlooking our first game in the playoffs,” LeBlanc said.

Cormier feels almost the same way.

“I just think that we have to bring our ‘A’ game,” he said. “It’s not really hard to get up for the game. We bring the same intensity every week. We go hard, we go fast, that’s all that matters.

“The last game doesn’t matter. It’s the playoffs, we all start 0-0.”