The Westgate High School football team picked up wins against crosstown rival New Iberia Senior High in all three games of the annual Bayou Bowl contest on Thursday.

Both the freshmen and JV teams scored 6-0 victories over the Yellow Jackets.

The varsity game was a hotly contested affair, with touchdowns from senior receiver Bryant Leon and senior running back Tavias Gordon proving to be the difference between the two teams.

Gordon’s eight-yard touchdown run in the first half came just three plays into the Tigers’ first possession of the night. Leon scored his first touchdown of the game in the opening half following an inch-perfect pass from senior Jaboree Antoine for a 38-yard touchdown. Leon added a second score to his tally in the second half with a nine-yard touchdown, also from Antoine.

The Yellow Jackets scored their only points of the night from a 28-yard field goal by senior kicker Marshall Moore.

The game was the first real test for either team. The Yellow Jackets looked much improved from last season despite the touchdown drought across all three games.

Senior QB Kaiden Mcglasson ended the game with 51 passing yards from nine attempts and looked comfortable in the pocket against a skilled Westgate defense.

Senior RB Shanga Charles earned shared Most Valuable Player honors for his performance against the Tigers. Charles, always one to claw out an extra yard or two after contact, racked up 33 yards from eight carries.

For the Tigers, the Bayou Bowl was a good litmus test for the new offensive schemes put in place by first-year offensive coordinator Randall Antoine. In spite of a few growing pains and miscues, the team looked comfortable in the new offense. Senior QB/DB Jaboree Antoine impressed under center, totalling 113 yards and two touchdowns from four passes. Senior RB Tavias Gordon scored one touchdown and recorded 44 yards from six carries against NISH.

Westgate head coach Ryan Antoine said he was looking forward to analyzing game film and cleaning up some of the mistakes that his team displayed against NISH.

“We have to clean some things up. We can’t come off the sideline with delay of game penalties or substitution penalties,” Antoine said. “We have to be clean and just execute. That’s just Day 1 football, guys not paying attention and guys not being ready. We have some things to work on, but we came out of it pretty much injury free and that’s 100% what we’re trying to do.”

Even with penalties and miscommunication slowing the team down, Westgate still managed to incorporate athletes into several different positions on both sides of the ball against the Yellow Jackets. According to Antoine, that flexibility is a major focus for the team following last year’s injury crisis.

“We tell our kids all the time, ‘you don’t have a position, you’re a football player.’ We expect them to play football in any position we put them in,” he explained. “We do it in practice and switch people around and it makes us effective and flexible. It makes teams have to defend us in every single spot and that’s what we want. We want you to have to defend every blade of grass and every single player. We had our quarterback go down last year and we can’t get caught in that same situation, so we’re going to put a lot of different guys in a lot of different spots and hopefully it continues to work for us.”

The Tigers will kick off the regular season on Friday with a home contest against Lake Charles College Prep. NISH will face off against Pineville on the road for the Yellow Jackets’ season opener on Friday. Both games are set to begin at 7:00 p.m.