Colonels take small, but effective 2018 class
February 14, 2018
POWER points
February 15, 2018
A wise man once said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
In the case of Nicholls State University athletics, truer words have never been said.
I took my job at Rushing Media in Dec. 2009. My boss at the time hyped the job up by saying that I’d get to cover Nicholls athletics.
Yo, Ms. Boss Lady, a word of advice: that was not a good recruiting pitch at the time.
Nicholls was a mess in 2009. None of the major sports teams were consistently competitive and interest in Colonels athletics in the community was non-existent.
But little did I know that things were about to begin trending upward in a big way.
In 2008, Nicholls hired DoBee Plaisance to coach women’s basketball. That team needed a miracle. They were one of the worst college teams I’d ever seen at the time of my arrival.
But through energy, passion and recruiting with a purpose, the Colonels got it turned around. No, Nicholls hasn’t yet won the Southland Conference in women’s hoops, but they are a contender year-in and year-out – currently sitting at .500 in the league at press-time, despite several underclassmen in key positions.
Coach Plaisance is an amazing person and she’s come to be a friend. Her energy for her job is contagious and that passion convinced players that Thibodaux wasn’t a lost cause, but was a place where paths could be paved and stories of resurgence could be told.
So Nicholls took what Plaisance was doing in women’s basketball and they started replicating it in all of their sports – hiring younger, passionate coaches who are tireless recruiters.
Flash forward to the present and my, oh, my, how things have turned around in Thibodaux.
Nicholls is a well-run, finely tuned athletic machine right now. They’re competitive in all of the major sports and they have collectively (for my dollar) the best collection of coaches in the entire Southland Conference.
Start with football. Tim Rebowe is a wizard. The work he’s done to turn around Nicholls football is nothing short of incredible.
Charlie Stubbs was a bad hire. Many folks locally warned me about the hire from the time the decision was made. It was an unpopular decision then and the detractors were right.
Stubbs knows football, but he doesn’t know Louisiana, nor its high schools. The Colonels were sound in their scheme, but were disastrous in their recruiting, which caused gaping holes within their depth chart, which teams easily exploited.
Insert Rebowe into the mix and things changed in a hurry.
Rebowe is a Louisiana man and a former high school coach in the River Parishes. He promised local talent and he’s delivered. The Colonels are almost exclusively comprised of Louisiana players right now, which has built interest. With that interest, the Colonels have also built a brand, which has allowed them to pluck away guys like Chase Fourcade and others who have come into the program and turned things around.
Nicholls’ football successes in 2017 were not a fluke. That team is for real. They will be contenders now and into the future.
The same can be said about men’s basketball.
Full disclosure: I will not be as critical of former Nicholls men’s basketball coach J.P. Piper as I am of Stubbs. I think by and large, Coach Piper did a good job in his decade with the Colonels – enjoying several successful seasons and Southland Conference Tournament berths throughout his tenure.
But sometimes in life, a change from the norm is needed and the move to replace Piper came at the right time. I think he’d concede that, as well.
New coach Richie Riley has come in and he’s refreshed and reenergized the Colonels and they’re just blitzing people right now in the Southland Conference.
Riley is the best recruiter in the league – bar none. He brought transfer players in to Thibodaux who, quite frankly, are too talented to play at a “Nicholls-sized” school.
Roddy Peters is a former five-star recruit. He’s torching opponents. Tavon Saddler, Legend Robertin and others are just as impressive.
Nicholls basketball is in first-place in the Southland right now and it’s hard to see a scenario where the team doesn’t chase Southland titles in the future.
Baseball and softball are the same.
Seth Thibodeaux has given life to a Colonels baseball team that desperately needed it 10 years ago. The Colonels have had some hard luck with injuries in recent seasons, but Thibodeaux brings quality players into the Nicholls’ program with several players taken in the MLB Draft in recent years.
Thibodeaux wants to be good. He expects to be good. Hell, the guy doesn’t even let me wear LSU clothes to Nicholls practices. I get grief about my purple pullover every, single time I’m at the field.
But that’s the mentality you need to have to succeed. It’s the same mentality shared by Angel Santiago, who has turned around the Colonels’ softball program in a short time – to a position where the Colonels are now on the short list to win the league annually.
Add it all together and it’s a successful renovation – a housekeeping project that’s gone good.
In 2009, this place was hard to stomach in terms of college athletics. All that losing is hard on the heart.
But now, it’s all different.
They found out what works and replicated it.
And now, Nicholls is one of the elite athletic departments in the entire Southland Conference.
And that’s saying a lot.
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