By JOHN JAMES MARSHALL, Journal Sports
When his team gets ready to play Captain Shreve Thursday night in a District 1-5A game at Lee Hedges Stadium, Evangel head coach Denny Duron will take a moment to look across the field to the Gators’ sideline.
But he won’t be checking to see who is warming up or how checking out how fired up the opposing team is. Instead, he will see something else.
Himself.
Through the lens of history, he will see a No. 12 jersey in those classic green-and-gold unforms. He will see a right-handed quarterback who was just a little bit nervous, but totally confident that he was as prepared as he could possibly be. He will see vision of a stadium that is full of fans and anticipation, even though the reality will be different.
And then it will be time for the kickoff and all of that will go away. Almost.
You won’t find Denny Duron’s name near the top of the list of career passing leaders in Captain Shreve history. Fourteen Gator quarterbacks have thrown for more yards than Duron did in his three-year career (1967-69).
But make no mistake about it; Duron was a foundational member of the Shreve football program. Duron left Captain Shreve, but Captain Shreve has never left Duron.
“People don’t realize it, but once you have a school that is your own and you go through everything and you have all of those memories,” Duron says, “there’s never a time when I don’t look on Saturday morning and see what the Gators did. You always follow your alma mater. It’s always special.”
The Captain Shreve football program has been well established for a long time with 16 district championships (including three in the last five seasons) and a 1974 state championship team that is still regarded as one of the greatest in local history.
Duron is the coach of an Evangel program that has won 27 district championships and 14 state championships. After Shreve’s state title in 1974, there was a long gap before another Shreveport school won a championship in the state’s highest classification. That school? Evangel in 1999, another on the list of greatest teams ever.
And the common denominator between those two schools is Denny Duron.
But there is also another straight line that can be drawn: The Shreve football coach was Lee Hedges, who had also started the Woodlawn football program seven years earlier. “All I knew about starting the program at Evangel,” Duron says, “is what I learned from coach Hedges.”
When Captain Shreve opened in 1967 and began playing football that fall, Duron was one of the team’s regular quarterbacks but as a sophomore, he was not the starter when it all began. “We were just so young,” Duron says. “A few guys had come from Byrd, but it mostly just those of us who came from Youree (Drive Junior High).”
One of those who came from Byrd was Stuart Smith, one of only three seniors on the team. Smith was the starting quarterback but his athletic ability was more suited to being a runner. So when the team needed someone to throw the ball, it turned to Duron.
There was only one problem.
“I had never played quarterback in my life,” he says. “I was a tight end and I loved it. Coach Hedges walked up to me the first week and said ‘Duron, I like the way you throw the ball back to the quarterback. I’m going to move you.’ That was not good news for me. I was terrified to be playing a new position and at the varsity level.”
His first “touchdown pass” came in the second game of the season – but it was to the opposing team.
Captain Shreve didn’t even have an official nickname when the first football game was played (Sept. 8, 1967) but by the fourth game it had both a nickname and a win. And the quarterback in that game was Duron.
If there were growing pains for Shreve, they didn’t last long. Shreve made the playoffs in its second year and went 8-2 in the third year.
“We knew we would be good,” Duron says. “It was a wonderful group of athletes that came from Youree Drive.”
High school football was different then, something that Duron, 72, will point out with great fondness.
“Those were the great years for the big public schools back then – Byrd, Woodlawn, Fair Park – and they had big bands and big pep squads,” Duron says. “Byrd and Fair Park had been the kings of the district and now Joe Ferguson was playing at Woodlawn during that time and had become the team to beat. Everything back then was so big. There were so many people at the games. So much pomp and pageantry.”
When the two teams kick off Thursday night, there may not be a whole lot of people that remember that the coach of Evangel used to be the quarterback of Captain Shreve. Many of the unaware will be wearing Evangel uniforms.
“I don’t think they know it,” Duron says. “I’ve told them, but I think it goes over their heads.”
But that really doesn’t matter. The memories Duron carries with him more than 50 years later are profound and he is still very aware of the impact his days at Captain Shreve have had on him.
“My biggest memory is the great joy of playing for a man like Lee Hedges,” he says. “There were other coaches as well on that staff who changed the trajectory of my life. Amazing men … they were amazing men.”
And if he looks hard enough Thursday night, Duron might also see the vision of them on the other sideline as well.
Contact JJ at johnjamesmarshall@yahoo.com