Sunday, July 7, 2013

Southern falls behind in championship chase

BATON ROUGE, Louisiana  -- Charles McClelland had the toughest assignment in the Southwestern Athletic Conference when the Prairie View grad was named athletic director at his alma mater in 2001.

Though just 29 and with a background in accounting, his mission was to turn around an athletic department that long had been the laughingstock of the SWAC.

McClelland figured his best bet was to look 300 miles east, to a Southern University program that treated the conference’s athletic fields like its own personal playground.

“When I became the athletic director at Prairie View, Southern was on top,” said McClelland, who has spent the past five years as AD at Texas Southern. “Not only were they winning, they had the attitude to go with it. They knew they were going to win. So I really looked in-depth at what Southern was doing in order to try to elevate Prairie View.”

The Jaguars ruled the SWAC with such authority that their fans claimed the acronym should stand for Southern Wins Another Championship. Never was Southern’s reign more prominent than in ...

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