He Built Southern Baseball Into a Powerhouse. Now the HBCU World Is Remembering Him.

Roger Cador didn’t just coach baseball at Southern University. He built something that hadn’t existed before.

Cador died this week at 74. Over 33 seasons as Southern’s head coach, he turned a program with modest history into the standard for HBCU baseball — 913 wins, 14 conference titles, 11 NCAA Tournament appearances. But the numbers only tell part of it.

The part people remember most happened in 1987. Southern became the first HBCU program to win an NCAA Tournament game, knocking off No. 2-ranked Cal State Fullerton 1-0. That wasn’t just a win. It was a statement that Black college baseball could compete with anyone. And it changed how other programs saw themselves.

Cador played at Southern in the early 1970s, hitting .393 in 1972 before the Atlanta Braves drafted him. He spent five seasons in their organization, then came back to Baton Rouge as an assistant for both baseball and basketball. In 1985 he took over the baseball program. He stayed until 2017.

Under him, Southern produced 10 All-Americans and 62 MLB draft picks. The most famous is Rickie Weeks, who won the Golden Spikes Award in 2003 and played 14 big league seasons. Weeks came through Southern because Cador had built a pipeline that scouts actually paid attention to.

But former players talk less about the wins and more about what Cador did off the field.

“He had a vision that was bigger than him,” former player Rev. William Bates told WAFB. “It was about everybody else. It was about how he could make everybody else better and how could he put Southern University on the map in another way outside of what it was traditionally known for.”

Vincent Price, another former player, put it bluntly: “He was worried about more than just winning. He was worried about you winning in life. He changed my life.”

Cador was inducted into the Southwestern Athletic Conference Hall of Fame in 2018 and the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame in 2019. Southern’s athletic director Roman Banks called him “a visionary, a mentor, a leader, and a true pillar of the Jaguar Nation.”

Current Southern head coach Chris Crenshaw said he called Cador in 2019 before taking an assistant job and asked for his blessing. “True to Coach Cador, he gave me a hard time at first and then said, ‘I know it’s in your heart. Come on back.’”

Crenshaw added: “Coach and I had a saying that will always be special to me. He said he would be holding my hand through it all, and I know he will continue to hold my hand until the end.”