By DOUG IRELAND, Journal Sports
All spring long, we’ve watched, read about, and heard about Northwestern State baseball player Thomas Marsala III.
A slugging first baseman, Marsala transferred to NSU last summer after starring at Western Kentucky. He leads the Demons with 11 home runs, 42 RBI, a .507 slugging percentage, an .882 on-base percentage, and is second on the team in hitting with a .310 batting average entering tonight’s game in Beaumont, Texas.
A look at the Demons’ roster gives some clue why he made the move from Bowling Green, Ky., to Natchitoches.
Marsala is from Monroe. He graduated from St. Frederick High School, where he played a couple games against St. Mary’s. He went to Baton Rouge Community College for a year.
So playing close to home had appeal.
But more insight reveals there are much deeper ties to Natchitoches and Northwestern for the Demons’ leading slugger, named earlier this week as an All-Southland Conference second-team first baseman.
There are purple and white roots in his family tree.
His great grandfather, Henry L. LaCour Sr., is a graduate of what was then Northwestern State College.
Henry’s daughter, Sandra “Sandy”Thomas’ Grandmother is a 1967 graduate with her bachelor’s degree and 1975 with her masters. Her husband Mike, Thomas’s grandfather, graduated from Northwestern along with Thomas’s aunt Tanya Jones Hudson and and much later, Tanya’s daughter Payton Hudson.
Mike’s mother, Louise Breazeale Hudson, attended the local college when it was the “Normal College of Louisiana” from its birth in 1884 until the Korean War years in the early 1950s.
Other relatives and graduates are great aunt Dede Hudson Anderson and great uncle Frank Hudson and his wife Cathy. All of them were born and raised in Natchitoches except for Tanya, Cathy, Payton and Thomas.
So as you keep tabs on the Demons this weekend in the Southland Conference Tournament, realize Marsala’s bond with Northwestern runs as deeply as perhaps any player in school history – at the very least, it’s multi-generational.