By JASON PUGH, Written for the LSWA
“When you build a house, you don’t build it from the roof down. You build it from the foundation up.”
With that little bit of “ol’ country boy common sense,” Dewain Strother, one of the nation’s leaders in all-time high school girls basketball coaching victories, summed up what he and the rest of Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame Class of 2026 espoused throughout Saturday night’s induction ceremonies inside the Natchitoches Events Center.
Strother was one of eight competitive-ballot inductees who were joined by a pair of Distinguished Service Awards in Journalism recipients, the Dave Dixon Louisiana Sports Leadership Award honoree and just the third Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame Ambassador Award electee in history who added their sterling resumes to the state’s shrine for its top athletes and sports journalists.
Strother’s remark regarding foundations was tied to the beginning of the Florien High School girls basketball team, which began play in the 1983-84 season with little fanfare and a grand total of four wins.
“That was about the time Title IX was hot for women’s sports,” Strother said. “They gave me the opportunity to start it. I knew I took on a big job, but I used some ol’ country boy common sense. There was a group in the eighth grade I was looking at, and I knew they could be a good team. We used some of the high schoolers to mold them. We won only four games that first year, and I thought, ‘I’m gonna get fired.’ The next year we were district champs.”
The step-by-step building process Stother instituted reached its zenith with a 48-0 state championship season in 1990-91 – the first of Strother’s six state championships at Florien, a Class B program that he built into a juggernaut. One year after that title, Florien started five players who would eventually play Division I basketball.
The success meant it wasn’t just basketball-obsessed Sabine Parish that took notice.
“I recruited a lot of them,” former Northwestern State women’s basketball coach James Smith said. “The kids were coachable and very fundamental.”
And successful. In addition to building the house that was Florien Lady Black Cats basketball, Strother built something intangible.
“Being there for that long, you have a certain culture,” said St. Thomas More boys basketball coach Danny Broussard, a 2025 Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame inductee. “Kids that come in don’t want to be the team that lets them down and fail. That tradition means a lot.”
Strother built a program that he led to 1,235 victories – the second most nationally among girls high school basketball coaches – after graduating from Northwestern with an education degree and no plans to go into coaching. He was a junior high physical education teacher at Florien who kept the scorebook for the boys basketball team when the principal asked him to start a girls program.
Mike McConathy also started a program at almost the same time. He built the Bossier Parish Community College program from scratch starting in 1983.
Even after developing a wildly successful program at BPCC over 16 seasons, he had been unable to land an NCAA Division I coaching job despite interviewing for five before the Northwestern post opened after the 1998-99 season.
The Demons had five winning seasons in 24 years of Division I play. One observer wasn’t sure if McConathy had come from a planet far, far away.
“Mike McConathy stood up at his (hiring) press conference and talked about bringing Northwestern basketball back to where it was when his dad and uncles played here (before packed gyms in 20-win seasons in the 1950s),” said longtime NSU SID and Hall of Fame chairman Doug Ireland. “I thought, ‘This guy’s from Mars. You can’t do that here.’”
Not only could McConathy and his team do it, they did. They played in the Southland Conference Tournament finals ending his first year, with only four newcomers on the roster.
Two years after arriving in Natchitoches following a 352-victory career his hometown junior college, McConathy’s 2000-01 Demon team was in the NCAA Tournament – a first for the program.
“I was fortunate to coach here and be able to be who I am,” McConathy said. “I do what I feel like I’m supposed to do to set an example. You do the little things. Don’t ask anyone to do what you wouldn’t do yourself. Those things are so important. If you impact your players and your staff around you, that allows you and your university to be seen in a different light.”
Never did that light shine as bright on Northwestern as it did March 17, 2006, when McConathy’s second NCAA Tournament entry stunned third-seeded Iowa on Jermaine Wallace’s last-second corner 3-pointer – a shot that still graces most March Madness intros during tournament season.
“Skip to the happy ending, but Mike was the perfect coach at the perfect time for Natchitoches and Northwestern State,” said former NSU Director of Athletics Greg Burke. “He just checked a lot of boxes. Sixteens seasons at BPCC at 22 wins per season. He told us he was going to recruit Louisiana. He did. The biggest shot (against Iowa) was made by a guy from Heflin.”
More than 20 years after the defining shot in NSU history, McConathy can still vividly recall the moments before Wallace’s moment in the spotlight.
“Ryan Edwards, whose dad was a doctor and an LSU graduate, was on our staff,” McConathy said. “Ryan rode to school in sixth grade with me to take (McConathy’s son) Michael into school with him because (Michael) didn’t like to go to school. (Iowa’s Greg) Brunner gets fouled and Ryan said, ‘Coach, we need to call timeout.’ I said, ‘OK, Ryan, we’ll do that.’
“Brunner shoots the first and made it (for a 63-61 lead). We iced him (with the timeout). We talked about what we were gonna do. He missed (the second), Luke Rogers steps in, blocks out and rebounds. He looks up, passes and we go into our break. The ball goes to the right side and Kerwin Forges from New Orleans takes a pretty good shot with too much time on the clock to be honest. Jermaine Wallace is on the left side of the floor and did everything he’s supposed to do. He gets to the rebound spot he was supposed to go to. The ball falls to him, because he was where he was supposed to be.
“He had enough thought to look at the clock, see how much time he had and dribble to the corner and launch the winning shot.”
That was the most nationally relevant of McConathy’s 682 career on-court victories, but the 90 percent graduation rate of his players and their post-playing careers and lives brings as big a smile to his face.
The same can be said for the faith that drove McConathy to build the program at BPCC from scratch and then to take over a Demon program that had previously had just five winning seasons in its Division I history.
“Without the Lord Jesus Christ and our relationship with God, I wouldn’t have anything,” he said. “I’ve been given everything – an opportunity to be raised in a Christian home. They played it out for me to follow Christ or not. That’s so critical to do that. I had the opportunity to have a Christian wife and Christian boys and, hopefully, Christian grandchildren when they get to that point. If they do, that will be the greatest win ever.”
Former LSU men’s basketball coach John Brady had to rebuild a once-proud Tiger program while following legendary coach Dale Brown.
Brady came to Baton Rouge from Samford University, a mid-major program in Birmingham, Alabama, but the roots of his landing in Baton Rouge began decades earlier in Starkville, Mississippi, where Brady was a graduate assistant at Mississippi State.
“You go through life and you don’t know who you’ll meet and where they’ll show up later,” Brady said. “I went to Mississippi State as a GA and the other graduate assistant was Joe Dean Jr. We became great friends, and I’d go to Joe’s house and spend the weekend with the Dean family. (Joe Dean Sr., who later became LSU’s athletics director) helped get guys jobs, made calls for them. I had to be successful for the opportunity for Joe (Sr.) to hire me. The relationship I made with Joe Dean Jr. led me to knowing his father. Twenty years later, I’m the head coach at LSU. It’s funny how life works and the twists and turns along the way.”
Following a Louisiana legend like Brown was not an easy transition, but Brady did it his way, relying on his basketball mantra to mold an LSU team on probation into an SEC championship team.
“John had a saying, ‘Responsibility plus accountability equals success,’” said Brady assistant Kermit Davis, who eventually became a head coach at Middle Tennessee and Ole Miss.
That equation – and the signing of Fair Park High School standout Stromile Swift – ignited a turnaround on the court and helped Brady truly start building a program that dealt with the loss of six scholarships across a three-year period.
Despite the sanctions, the foundation was in place for the building that would crest with a magical 2005-06 season where a group of six players from within a 50-mile radius helped Brady take the Tigers to the Final Four – a joyride that included an upset of top-ranked Duke and came just months after Hurricane Katrina ransacked the Louisiana Gulf Coast.
“That team, the top six players were from within 50 miles of Baton Rouge,” said Brady, who led the Tigers to a pair of SEC championships and three NCAA Tournament berths. “They had grown up playing with each other or against each other, and they had a really special bond. Every one of them was touched by the tragedy of Katrina, and I think that brought them even closer together.”
As a quarterback at then-Jesuit High School in 1976, John James Marshall became a state champion, throwing the game-winning screen pass in the title game.
That trophy may have portended athletic greatness, but Marshall’s office wall now overflows with innumerable awards from the Louisiana Sports Writers Association, an organization Marshall served as president of before his 30th birthday.
His writing prowess is just one of the tools in a multi-faceted toolbox that helped lead Marshall to the Distinguished Service Award in Sports Journalism.
“I couldn’t do anything else,” Marshall said. “I spent my whole being around sports. In baseball season, it was baseball. In football season, it was football. I just loved sports. Eventually, I kept loving sports when my friends were off becoming accountants and lawyers. I missed that train. This was a logical thing, keep doing sports. I can write about it. Everything in sports, what goes into players, coaches, the intricacies, everything involved in it fascinated me.”
In an appropriate iron sharpens iron moment, Marshall and 2022 DSA awardee Teddy Allen shared the 1987 Associated Press Sports Editors national best feature award.
“A guy like J.J. will make you work an hour longer, ready a little more copy, make another phone call because you know he’s going to be that good,” Allen said.
Marshall had plans on being a “40-year newspaper veteran,” but the industry had other ideas.
Marshall pivoted as deftly as a second baseman turning a 6-4-3 double play and teamed with his brother, Ben, to create “Sports Talk with J.J. and Ben” on Shreveport sports radio.
Thirty-four years later, the back-and-forth banter between brothers remains on the air as Louisiana’s longest-running sports talk radio show. Along the way, Marshall has served his alma mater, now Loyola College Prep, educating the next generation of journalists and becoming a part-time documentarian whose latest labor of love is a documentary about that 1976 state championship Jesuit squad, which Marshall hopes to unveil at the team’s 50th anniversary reunion in September.
“I was going to be a sports writer my entire life,” Marshall said. “In 1981, that’s what you thought. Those guys were 40-year veterans. I had to make a decision. When opportunity knocks, you answer the door. I didn’t know what it was going to lead to.”
Contact Jason at pughj@nsula.edu