Rapides inductees sparkle in Hall of Fame spotlight
By JASON PUGH, Written for the LSWA
NATCHITOCHES – “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,” Rapides Parish native 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.”
Strother knew about winning championships. He was a freshman guard on Plainview High School’s 1965 boys state champs.
The step-by-step building process Stother instituted in Sabine Parish 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, himself 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 and by far tops in Louisiana.
Those who followed the Tioga Lady Indians when Kathy Holloway coached noted the team’s tough defense. That wasn’t modeled on how young Kathy Stewart played at now-defunct Poland High School.
Holloway, inducted Saturday night as the Dave Dixon Louisiana Sports Leadership Award winner, established a long-standing Class C state tournament record by scoring 86 points across two games while at Poland.
A lifelong love of basketball led Holloway, a math major at LSU, to a career in high school sports, first as a head coach at Tioga then as the first female president of the Louisiana High School Coaches Association, achieved in 1986, and as the president of the National High School Athletic Coaches Association in 1992.
“Title IX was passed in 1972,” said Julie Wilkerson, one of four high school All-Americans Holloway coached at Tioga. “That energized someone like Mrs. Holloway.”
That energy may have indirectly led Holloway to her trailblazing positions within the coaches associations she eventually chaired.
“In those days, there was All-Star Week and on the Friday before the all-star games on Saturday, there was the final meeting of the coaches association to elect the president,” Holloway said. “One of the guys who was running asked me at the barbecue, ‘Will you vote for me (for president)?’ I said, ‘Yeah, if you’ll vote for me if I ever run.’ He said, ‘There ain’t ever gonna be a woman president of this association.’ That sealed it for me.”
Following her gilded administrative career, the NSCA in 2021 created the Kathy Holloway Women of Inspiration Award that honors a female “that has promoted female athletics by either coaching, serving, supporting or leading high school female athletic programs that focus on changing lives and inspiring women to strive for greatness.”
Holloway remains involved in the sport she loves, working closely with the Upward Basketball program at First Baptist Church in Pineville where her son, Stewart, is the pastor.
“She’s been involved the past 13 or 14 years,” he said. “It’s a fantastic way to use her skills to invest in another generation.
“Mom didn’t win a lot of state championships, but she’s been a champion in a lot of other ways.”
One swing propelled Warren Morris into college baseball immortality but a lifetime after it earned his place in the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame.
Morris, an Alexandria native who played at Bolton High School before heading to LSU, delivered perhaps the most iconic moment in College World Series history when he launched a first-pitch curveball from Miami closer Robbie Morrison over the right-field wall at Rosenblatt Stadium in Omaha, Nebraska, for the first, and still only, CWS-clinching, walk-off home run in history on June 8, 1996.
“Coach (Skip Bertman) used to tell us you can’t be afraid to fail,” Morris said. “Tim Lanier (who had struck out against Morrison the at-bat prior) looked at me and said three words, ‘Pick me up.’ As a team, those are the words you have to hear. No one’s always going to come through in the clutch or always be the guy. Someone else is there to pick you up. All I can do is the best I can do. I’m going to be aggressive. That’s why I hit the first pitch.”
Morris was honored with the Louisiana Sports Ambassador Award, joining national sports broadcaster Tim Brando and legendary Grambling baseball coach Wilbert Ellis as the only winners of that award. It recognizes remarkable impact as a sports representative of the state. Since his major league career ended, Morris has made countless appearances promoting LSU and college baseball and is immortalized with a statue in Omaha.
“Warren embodies everything you want a citizen to be as far as work ethic, integrity and compassion,” legendary LSU baseball SID Bill Franques said.
Morris’ home run embodied what it meant to meet the moment.
While it ended on the highest of high notes, Morris’ 1996 season was interrupted by a hamate bone injury that limited him to 22 games – all of which resulted in LSU victories.
Morris enjoyed a nine-year professional baseball career following his LSU tenure. He finished third in the 1999 National League Rookie of the Year voting after hitting .288 with 15 home runs and 73 RBIs for Pittsburgh.
The son of a basketball coach, Morris collected baseball cards as a child. In his mind, all of those players hailed from major metropolitan areas. Today, Morris carries a few of his own cards when he speaks to children.
“No one from Alexandria at that time was at that level,” Morris said. “That was for someone else. I have some cards with me whenever I talk to kids know. I turn it around and show them Alexandria, Louisiana. If I can do something like that, there’s no reason they can’t achieve whatever it is their dream is.”
To cap the whirlwind following his home run, Morris – along with LSU coach Skip Bertman – was part of the 1996 U.S. Olympic baseball team, which won a bronze medal in the Atlanta Games.
“Just incredible,” Morris said of the Olympic experience. “It doesn’t get talked about enough. I still get goosebumps thinking about it, walking out on the field in Atlanta with 50,000 people chanting, ‘U-S-A.’ I’m as proud of representing my country as anything I ever did in athletics.”
