Bolton Academy will not field a varsity football team this fall. Mercifully.
Bolton, which became a pre-K–12 Academic & Performing Arts Magnet School before the 2024-25 academic year, has had three straight winless seasons and six winless seasons in the last 11 years. This last season was especially tough – Bolton’s 10 opponents outscored the Bears 450-26, including a 69-0 defeat against Avoyelles.
The last time the Bears won a district title was 20 years ago, when they had an 0-5 start but won all five of their District 3-3A games before losing to top-seeded Notre Dame of Crowley in the first round of the playoffs, 49-12. Running back Jarvis Jackson rushed for 208 yards and four touchdowns in a 40-14 win over Grant to highlight the win for Bolton’s last district championship in 2006. John Ware was then in his first year as head coach.
That was only the fifth time since 1998 that Bolton had a non-losing regular season. Yet, there was a time, back in its prime ….
Bolton has a strong football history if you go back far enough. And I’m not talking about the 1990 team of Coach Brian Parmley, led by quarterback Darrel White, that finished 10-2 with a No. 7 ranking and the District 4-3A championship. White earned All-Cenla Offensive Player of the Year honors rushing for 1,990 yards in the regular season, averaging 11 yards a carry.
Bolton played for the Class AAA state championship in 1974 when Aubrey Sanders was the head coach. The Bears clinched their second straight perfect regular season that year with a 32-14 win over arch-rival Pineville before a standing-room-only crowd at Bolton. Bernard Reed had three touchdown runs in that contest. The Bears beat Eunice, Jesuit-Shreveport and Franklinton in the playoffs before bowing to Richwood of Monroe, 28-8 in the state championship game in Monroe.
Financial advisor Bart Schmolke and Alexandria City Judge Richard Starling Jr. were quarterbacks during that heyday in the early 1970s. All-staters from the state runner-up team were tight end Andrew Fatheree, running back Mike Stewart and linebacker John Fisher.
That was Bolton’s first attempt to win a state championship since 1915, when Tom Dutton’s Bears went 6-0 and “claimed” the state championship in an era when informal state championships were common. In 1914 and 1917, for example, there were three or even four games that had been designated as state championships.
Bolton’s first year as a school, then located on Sixth and Beauregard Streets in downtown Alexandria, was 1915. The Louisiana High School Sports Association didn’t come into existence until that year. Dutton, when his Bolton team was 5-0 – including a 9-0 victory over Louisiana College – made quite the boast in a press release.
At a time when some other teams in the state were claiming to be the best, Dutton wrote that Bolton was “the one team that ranks above all others when it comes to handing out titles,” according to the Alexandria Daily Town Talk. He wrote that he had a team that “fights like the dickens,” and he believed it could whip any team in the state, except maybe for Warren Easton (then Boys High) in New Orleans.
With a 9-0 season-ending victory over Baton Rouge before “maybe the largest crowd ever for an athletic event at that time” in Alexandria, Dutton claimed a state championship. The first names of players didn’t make the papers in those days but the last names of some players from that team look familiar: Scott, Nachman, Staples, Bradford, Holloman, etc.
Dutton also accused Monroe of trying to “put over a raw deal” by trying to play an ineligible player, Sim Nettles, who was over 21 years old and had played on the Winnfield team seven years earlier. “Consequently,” he wrote, “he could not have been a bona fide (high school) student … unless he had been a very poor student during the preceding seven years.”
In the same year Bolton claimed the state title, the New Orleans Times-Picayune sponsored a game it labeled for the state championship in 1915 between Jesuit and Waren Easton, the first Catholic and public high school, respectively, in New Orleans. Warren Easton won, 13-12.
Bolton football conjures memories of many bright former stars. Here are just some:
David Guidry was a four-sport star at Bolton in 1976-77, who later played eight games at quarterback as a sophomore at USL.
Mickey Slaughter, who played quarterback for head coach Maxie Lambright at Bolton in the 1950s, later did so well at Louisiana Tech he was a seventh-round draft choice by the Denver Broncos, then of the old American Football League. He was the first quarterback picked in the draft. His four-year pro-career was spoiled by a series of injuries. He was later the offensive coordinator at Tech, when Lambright was the Bulldogs’ head coach.
Lambright is on Tech’s Mt. Rushmore of football coaches, compiling a 95-36-2 record over 12 years, with seven Southland Conference titles and five assorted national championships. At Bolton he compiled a 22-7-1 record (.750 percentage) in three seasons (1956-58). Although he didn’t lead Bolton to a state title, in 1958 he coached the Bears to a victory over Lake Charles, the eventual Class AAA state champion.
Bolton football may not be gone for good. The tentative plan reportedly is to play middle school football only with hopes that the numbers and interest in a varsity program will eventually return.