Inside a Dollarway Fieldhouse rugged on the outside is as pristine a basketball gymnasium as when Kabion Ento starred on the Fighting Cardinals’ basketball teams of the 2010s.
The facility at the old Dollarway High School campus came alive Saturday afternoon when Ento, nearly 10 years after graduation, was celebrated as a Canadian Football League champion with a dinner organized by his mother Vonda Rogers. Underneath the banners of Dollarway’s championship teams, the 28-year-old Montreal Alouette shared the head table with his fiancee Jae’Lisa Allen, a former basketball standout at White Hall, and 9-year-old daughter A’kyre Ento.
“We were excited about his accomplishment,” Rogers said. “Going to Canada and the CFL for the first year and they were ranked bottom, and to come up and win the Grey Cup [the CFL’s championship trophy], we thought that was really exciting. Me being a little prejudiced, being his mom, I thought he should be celebrated.”
Ento followed a brief career with the Green Bay Packers (2019-22) by signing with the Alouettes in January 2023. The 6-foot-1, 187-pound cornerback was elevated from the practice roster and started in 15 regular-season games with 48 defensive tackles, 7 interceptions and 7 pass knockdowns.
“We kind of had some injuries, so I had to step up and step in,” Ento said. “Luckily, I was able to play for basically the whole year. When I got adjusted was toward the middle of the season when I began to understand things, understand the dimensions of the field and everything that was going on. It took some time — I’m still adjusting now — but getting that first year under my belt, by the end of the season, I got more comfortable.”
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Among Canada’s major differences from the American game, the field is 110 yards long between the end zones and 65 yards wide (100-by-53 in the U.S.), 12 men are on the field for each side instead of 11, and each team gets three downs to make a first instead of four.
The Alouettes (“alouette” is French for “lark”) went 11-7 in the regular season, beat the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and Toronto Argonauts in the East Division playoffs and topped the Winnipeg Blue Bombers 28-24 in the Grey Cup final on Nov. 19 in Hamilton, Ontario. Ento intercepted a pass and recovered a fumble in the title game.
Montreal won the championship with a new owner Pierre Karl Peladeau, first-year head coach Jason Maas, and new starting quarterback Caleb Evans. With other new pieces coming together, Ento said, the Alouettes were forced to get to know each other.
The challenge made winning the Grey Cup all the more sweeter, Ento revealed.
“We were still learning the game as far as CFL-wise,” he said. “I think toward the end of the season, you started to see it all jell together, and we all had a close relationship with each other. The way our coach did things, he made us interact with each other, made sure we believed in each other, made sure we knew each other on and off the field, and we became a close unit. We were steadily learning each other up to the Grey Cup game. We’re still doing that now.”
Ento was The Commercial’s Defensive Player of the Year during the 2013 season, although he was the top receiving target of Offensive Player of the Year Joshua Liddell — who played safety at the University of Arkansas — during a run to the 4A state semifinals. The previous basketball season, Ento and Liddell were key cogs on a Dollarway basketball team that finished 4A state runner-up to Pottsville.
“At the beginning of the season, I didn’t know what we had because we had lost a great player in Jeremiah [Young, a running back who went on to the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff] and we lost a couple of key guys,” Ento said. “When you lose somebody like that, it’s like, what’s next? I knew we were talented. I knew we had ability and everything. When we started having the season, I saw, ‘Wow, we are really good.'”
Liddell’s mother Vickie was at every game. She was Dollarway’s band director.
Joshua Liddell was working on a perfect passing season, Vickie said, when Ento dropped a pass during a rainy game at Crossett.
Still, the Cardinals, coached by alumnus Cortez Lee, were electrifying, she said.
“We loved that team,” Vickie Liddell said. “We were there to cheer them on, and KB [Ento] was in the band, too. He didn’t tell you that, did he?”
Ento said he was supposed to play the tenor drum, but Mrs. Liddell showed him grace because he was messing up in practice a lot.
“We went to Florida, and my banner carriers were not there with me,” she said. “We needed someone to carry the banner.”
To complete the story, Ento said he and teammate Henri Murphy carried the banner. The two also ran together on Dollarway’s 2014 state championship track team.
“He came back and spoke to my classes a few times, too,” Vickie Liddell said of Ento. “I was just so happy to have him in my class. He would come back and tell the students how important it was to take care of the little things, that their academics are quite important, and how important it was to not wait until your junior or senior year because it’s too late to make up for stuff. He was looked up around campus, too.”
Ento graduated from Dollarway in 2014 and spent two seasons at Mississippi’s East Central Community College, where he caught 59 passes for 885 yards and played the 2015 season with Murphy. He was named first-team all-region following his sophomore season.
He played two of the next three seasons at the University of Colorado (redshirting in 2017), making 20 catches for 335 yards. He won the Buffaloes’ Derek Singleton Award for showing the most spirit, dedication and enthusiasm.
The Packers picked him up as an undrafted free agent and converted him to cornerback. Despite strong preseasons, he was waived before the 2019 and 2022 seasons, spent all of 2020 on injured reserve and was on the practice squad in 2021.
“I learned a lot of football, especially defensively in Green Bay. That’s what helped me when I went to the CFL,” Ento said. “It’s still football, and a lot of the things are still the same. You’ve just gotta find a way to put different players [together]. [Being in the NFL] taught me general football, general defense and how to be a pro.”
Though Dollarway’s latest pro athlete can boast a Grey Cup title, his hopes of another shot at the NFL are still high.
“If I ever had the opportunity to play in the NFL again, I’d definitely probably take the opportunity,” Ento said.
Montreal Alouettes cornerback Kabion Ento (center) is flanked by fiancee Jae’Lisa Allen and daughter A’kyre Ento, 9. (Pine Bluff Commercial/I.C. Murrell)
Memorabilia from Kabion Ento’s playing days with the Green Bay Packers and Montreal Alouettes are on display at a dinner in his honor at the Dollarway Fieldhouse. (Pine Bluff Commercial/I.C. Murrell)