BATON ROUGE, Louisiana -- Before there was Bethune-Cookman, their dominance in the MEAC, and their ability to punch above their weight against the big boys of college baseball in postseason play, there was Southern University doing the same in the SWAC.Before there was Mervyl Melendez, a wizard of a coach in not one, but two HBCU conferences as the head coach of Bethune-Cookman and Alabama State, there was Roger Cador as the head coach at Southern.
And before more recent HBCU players such as Hiram Burgos and Peter O’Brien (albeit with a stop at Miami along the way) made their debuts in the major leagues, there was Southern’s Rickie Weeks, who a hit a cool .500/.619/.987 as a junior for Southern and became the first player from an HBCU school to win the Golden Spikes Award. And prior to that, there was Southern’s Fred Lewis, who carved out a nice seven-year major league career, most of which was spent with the San Francisco Giants. And before him, there was Southern’s Trenidad Hubbard, a ten-year MLB veteran. Anyway, you get the idea.
“In that time frame, every black kid wanted to go to Southern,” Michael Coker, Contemporary Reporter for BlackCollegeNines.com, a leading site covering HBCU baseball, told College Baseball Central. “He was getting the cream of the crop…He had a bunch of 30-win seasons and a couple of 40-win seasons. That’s unheard of in HBCU baseball.”
Under Cador’s leadership alone, a period of time that stretched from 1985 to 2017, the Jaguars collected 14 SWAC championships and made 11 trips to the NCAA Tournament.
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