Carlos Treadway dreamed of playing in the NFL when he was with the Dolphins.
Not the Miami Dolphins. His youth league football team in Alexandria, coached by his father, career military Air Force man Johnie Treadway, was nicknamed the Dolphins.
Carlos carried that NFL dream through his time as a star football player at Alexandria Senior High and Northwestern State University. He played in seven games and started in three his true freshman season, when NSU under coach Sam Goodwin advanced to the FCS quarterfinals in 1988. Entering his senior year at NSU, he was rated as the third best draft-eligible tight end in the country at all competitive levels. And during his senior season, he showcased his ability to both block and catch, earning first-team All-Southland Conference and All-Louisiana honors.
“On the first day of the (NFL) draft,” he said, “I was told by a couple of teams they would pick me up on the second day, but it didn’t happen. Then I was told I might get some free agent offers, and none came. I had a degree. I figured it was probably time for me to quit following dreams and do something else.”
After he graduated, he went to Biloxi, where his mother lived, and got a job selling cars at a Ford dealership. Curiously, the general manager at the dealership was Ed Adams, who previously had worked at the Ford dealership in Alexandria, and he recognized Treadway as soon as he walked in the door. “He hired me on the spot,” said Carlos.
That job led to a three-decade rise to the highest levels of the company, where he is now the executive vice president of Ford Credit International and lives in London, the city of his birth when his father was stationed there. He and his wife Kim, a native of Detroit, have been married for 22 years and they have one son, Austyn, who is a junior economics major at NYU.
Treadway was honored recently at NSU, being inducted into the N-Club Hall of Fame for his athletic career, and this was the latest in a string of honors he has received from NSU. In 2022 he was inducted into the Long Purple Line Alumni Hall of Distinction and in ’24 he received the N-Club’s Distinguished Service Award.
“It’s a real honor,” said Treadway, who has been actively engaged with the NSU Alumni Association and Demons Unlimited Foundation boards as well as other roles supportive of NSU football and the university. “I’m real proud of the way I’ve been able to contribute to Northwestern State.”
Treadway’s rise through the ranks at Ford has taken him across the country and the world. He became a branch asset manager for Ford Credit in Fort Worth, Texas in 2001 and a year-and-a-half later was promoted to branch operations manager. While in Fort Worth in 2002, with help from the company’s financial support, he enrolled in the professional MBA program at TCU’s Neely School of Business with the goal of refining his knowledge of finance. He told TCU Magazine that in the last three hours of the MBA program his class went to Italy, “and that is what really opened my mind to the possibility of working abroad. It gave me the courage to let the company know that I’d like to do an international assignment.”
Treadway received such an assignment in 2013, taking his family to Shanghai, where he worked as business development manager for Ford Credit Asia Pacific. While in China, Carlos and Kim enrolled their second grader in a private school for students from the close-knit expatriate community. He stayed there through 8th grade. While in China, Carlos had to navigate cultural issues and customs while working with a translator. He took to it as naturally as a slant-in pass route.
His career progressed to such a degree in China that by the time he left the country in January 2020 – the year of the Covid-19 pandemic – he had become president of Ford Finance in China – an organization that employed more than 600 people.
Carlos thinks back to those who influenced him as a youth, and he counted, first, his father and mother, great examples for him with their work ethic and support. “They sat in the same spot together at Turpin Stadium for our home games. I could look up there and see them and knew I had their support.” He also cherishes now the discipline he deserved at times and received from his father, who retired from the Air Force as a Senior Staff Sergeant and now lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Carlos also credits his coach at ASH, Butch Stoker, for laying the foundation for discipline, hard work and teamwork that carried over to NSU and later to his business career.
He fondly recalls the summer before his freshman year at NSU going up to Natchitoches in the evenings for “throw and catch” sessions with such NSU receivers as Floyd Turner, who later played five of his nine NFL seasons with the New Orleans Saints, and Al Edwards, who played three seasons in the NFL with the Buffalo Bills. Scott Stoker, Butch’s son who was entering his senior season at quarterback for NSU and would later spend some years there as head coach, was throwing the passes in the workouts.
As for his NSU coach, Sam Goodwin, Carlos said, “He coached me hard, but he also loved on me. He took great care of me.
“He always knew I was a leader,” Treadway said. “He was special to me. He and my dad, my first coach,” he went on. “I am what I am now because of the way my dad raised me and because of the way Sam Goodwin coached me.”