Be a part of Leesville High School forever and the Alumni Association is selling commemorative bricks that will be placed at the entrances to the new Leesville High School. As alumni, you can purchase bricks for yourselves, for other alumni, or in memory of alumni. The money raised will be used for scholarships and other projects for LHS. Bricks are now $35 each. You may mail in your brick form with payment, or you may pay via PayPal and email your brick form (leesvillealumni@gmail.com). If you chose to pay using PayPal, please be sure to email your brick form!
Homecoming 2022
Homecoming 2022 is scheduled for September 23rd and 24th.
More information on Homecoming 2022 activities above, just click on the Current Newsletter tab. We are looking forward to a great Homecoming!
LHS Alumni Cookbooks
Leesville High
School Bricks
Membership Information
**Please be sure to fill out Name and Class Year before clicking "Buy Now"**
Cookbooks, with more than 400 recipes contributed by alumni, will be on sale on Friday at the coffee and the luncheon. They are $20. You can also buy one with PayPal, and have it mailed. The cost is $25.
LHS Sports Hall of Fame
Leesville High School Alumni Association Announces
2022 Sports Hall of Fame Inductees
Nikita Wilson and Foster Thomas
LHS Brick Payment
Have you paid your dues? The LHS Alumni Association is the reason we have such a successful homecoming weekend. By supporting your alumni association, you are giving back to LHS through scholarships awarded and donations made to the school. Your dues provide the opportunity for members to keep in touch with fellow alumni. Follow the link to "read more" about membership opportunities, prices, and how to pay.
Leesville High School
Alumni Association
Hi there, all you Wampus Cats:
We hope you are enjoying the new webpage. We are reminding you that this webpage and the Leesville High School Alumni Facebook page are the only official Wampus Cats sites on the World Wide Web. There are other sites purporting to be Wampus Cats or Leesville High School alumni pages. These are commercial websites and are not supported by the LHS Alumni Association. If you join one of them, you are not part of the official Wampus Cat/LHS Alumni Association. We are a non-profit group. The alumni who work for you are all volunteers. No one is paid
Cookbook Payment
**Please be sure to fill out Name and Class Year before clicking "Buy Now"**
All bricks that were ordered before the July 1st, 2021 deadline have been installed. We are hoping to have those that were ordered by the July 1st, 2022 deadline installed by Homecoming 2022.
The Leesville High School (LHS) Alumni Association is proud to announce the 2022 inductees into the LHS Sports Hall of Fame: Nikita Wilson and Foster Thomas. Wilson and Thomas join Wampus Cat greats Kevin Mawae, Eddie Fuller, Ted Paris, Richard Reese, Robert Gaines, Terry Holt, Grant Westerchil, Holly Wentz-Reeves, TB Porter, Demond Mallet and Greg Fontenot in the Hall.
Nikita Wilson is a 1983 graduate of LHS. He was a record setting and highly successful basketball star at Leesville and is the only Wampus Cat cager to have his jersey retired at LHS. Nikita was a two-time First Team All-District selection at LHS and a First Team All-State player in his senior year. He played for Coach Michael Mallet in his years at Leesville. Nikita was named a Parade All-American, making him the first Wampus Cat to receive the accolade. He led the Cats to back-to- back district titles and playoff appearances and a 26-0 regular season record in 1982. After his senior year, Nikita was named “Mr. Basketball” after his MVP performance at the LHSAA All Star Game. He was heavily recruited out of high school and the LHS gym was a constant parade of coaches from around the nation who tried to lure him to their teams. Basketball powerhouses like Louisville, Marquette and UCLA offered the talented Cat chances to play, but he chose to stay at home and play for LSU’s legendary coach, Dale Brown.
Wilson would be a four-year letterman at LSU, scoring over 1,300 points in his career, earning All-Freshman honors in the SEC and leading his team to the Elite 8 in 1987. He averaged 13, 10 and 15 points per game in his sophomore, junior and senior years at LSU. After college, Nikita was drafted by the Portland Trailblazers in the NBA, making him the first Wampus Cat to be drafted into the National Basketball Association. Nikita would enjoy a nine-year professional career, playing in the NBA and the CBA as well as in Europe.
Wilson joins other basketball greats Richard Reese, Grant Westerchil and Demond Mallet in the Hall of Fame.
Foster F. Thomas enters the Hall posthumously, as he was lost from this world in 2021. “Coach” Thomas was a linchpin professional educator who touched many lives in his decades of service in Vernon Parish. At the Head Coach of the Vernon High School, he led his Mighty Lions to three State Football Championships---in 1963, 1967 and 1968. His career coaching record at Vernon was 61-19-1 as his teams dominated play in Southwest Louisiana and at times, state-wide. In the three state championship games, the Lions scored 117 points total, and did not surrender a single score.
In the Fall of 1969, Vernon High and Leesville High were merged into one school, and Vernon was closed as a high school. Coach Thomas came to Leesville High and was immediately put on the staff coaching football and track and field, making him the first African-American coach at LHS. In 1972, Mr. Thomas was named the Assistant Principal at LHS, where he served for the next 11 years. He was a highly effective and highly respected professional educator and administrator and led the school and the community through the tumultuous period of integration. His impact as an education leader cannot be understated, as Leesville was named one of the top 100 schools in the nation in 1983. In 1984, Coach Thomas was promoted to duties at the Parish School Board Office where he served in a number of senior posts until his retirement in 1991.
Coach and his wife Pat, also a career educator, relocated to the Dallas area in 1998, where they lived until his passing in 2021. He was a member of Pleasant Hill Baptist Church in Leesville, later an active member and spiritual father at Beth-Eden Hills Missionary Church in Fort Worth and was a dedicated and devout follower of the Lord Jesus Christ his entire life. He was a proud veteran of the US Army and held degrees from Grambling State University and McNeese State University.