Episcopal School of Acadiana — The Smedes Mill

A girls' volleyball team in rural Louisiana won 16 consecutive state championships between 1987 and 2002 — a national record in any high school sport that still stands. The team played at Episcopal School of Acadiana, which sits on the grounds of what was once the Smedes Brothers Sugar Mill, a 75-acre property in Cade donated to the school in 1980 by Betty Smedes Jardine. The campus sits in the midst of a working sugarcane farm. Cypress buildings for classrooms were placed among live oak trees. Students walk outdoors between classes. There are no hallways. The sugarcane that once ran through the mill still grows at the campus edge. The school is a private institution, not a tourist site. But that volleyball record — unbroken by any high school program in any sport, anywhere in the country — is one of the most remarkable facts in Louisiana sports history.