Livingston Parish’s Doyle High School has announced the most significant step yet in its ambitious effort to bring football back to Livingston: the construction of a football field and athletic field house.

The Tigers’ home field will have seating for 1,500 spectators, while the field house will include a weight room, locker rooms, a medical area and other training facilities for student-athletes, according to plans announced Thursday.

The facilities will be a significant upgrade for a football program that is rebuilding itself after a nearly 40-year hiatus. For the past two years, since the school has revived its middle school team, players have worked out in two classrooms converted into a weight room and played their home games at Southeastern University’s Strawberry Stadium in Hammond, about 30 minutes away.

“There’s a lot of excitement about bringing football back to our community,” said Principal Ashley Sharp. “That support and excitement is helping to move our efforts forward at a great pace.”

The project will be funded by local school district funds that have been allocated through the School Board, according to a press release.

Doyle High School includes students in sixth grade through 12th grade. Its effort to rebuild the football program began in 2025 with a junior high team for students in grades 6 to 8.

It had been nearly 40 years since the school had a football program. Doyle's last varsity football season was in 1986, when the team finished 0-10. The program was disbanded after more than 20 years, leaving generations of students without organized football.

At the start of the 2024-25 school year, Doyle hired a new principal, Sharp, and a new junior high disciplinarian, Blane Westmoreland. Sharp, who had worked as a principal in the parish, and Westmoreland, who had coached football in the area, would joke about bringing the sport back to Doyle before they both started their new jobs. Then, after years of local support for the effort, it happened.

The middle school team took the field for the first time in September 2025 with Westmoreland as coach, donning the school’s purple and gold in front of stands of fans who had flocked to watch their first scrimmage.

“You could just feel an excitement,” Livingston Mayor J.T. Taylor said about the first scrimmage. “The first first down, you would've thought we won the Super Bowl.”

The 39-member team was mostly composed of boys who had never played a down of organized football. Westmoreland described the first day of the players wearing pads, saying it took most of them half the practice to put them on correctly.

“One of the coaches at one point in time was kind of yelling and telling the kids, ‘you should know this.’ And I looked at him, and I was like ‘why?’” Westmoreland said. “Like he’s never played, and with football being gone for so long, even his dad hasn’t played.”

In its second season this year, the team grew to 50 players and won a handful of games, Westmoreland said.

“We're still learning; we have a long way to go. But they understood it better, so they played it better,” he said. “Seeing their growth is one thing that the community was just so excited about.”

The school plans to add a junior varsity team next year, and a varsity team by fall 2029.

“I don't think anybody thought it would grow as fast as it currently is growing,” Westmoreland said.

Westmoreland said he hopes that hosting games on campus will help bring residents together and recreate the “Friday night lights” atmosphere Louisiana relishes.

In addition to athletic facilities, Westmoreland said the field house will help build nonathletic programs for students. The school plans to create digital media and production courses where students can film games and sideline interactions, and sports medicine courses where students can learn how to treat athletes.

“It's an athletic field house, but there's always been a tie into the academic world,” Westmoreland said.

Doyle's campus, which serves students in grades 6 through 12, also gives the school an opportunity to develop its middle school and high school football programs together. Unlike other schools in Livingston Parish, which have separate middle school campuses, Doyle’s students will train under the same program and coaches in middle school and high school.