By JASON PUGH, Northwestern State Sports Information Director
The Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame’s Class of 2026 announced Wednesday includes Bossier City native Mike McConathy, an Airline High and Louisiana Tech star player who became the state’s winningest college basketball coach in a combined 39 seasons at Bossier Parish Community College and Northwestern State.
Joining McConathy in the class to be enshrined in Natchitoches next June 25-27 are 2025 Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame inductee Sylvia Fowles, NFL stars Joe Horn, Todd McClure and Pat Williams, Major League Baseball All-Star Jonathan Lucroy, Florien High School girls basketball coaching legend Dewain Strother and McConathy’s contemporary on the college basketball sidelines, John Brady of LSU.
Former LSU College World Series hero Warren Morris will join the group as the winner of the Louisiana Sports Ambassador Award, which is being presented for the third time since 2020. Shreveport network sports broadcaster Tim Brando was the first Ambassador Award recipient and Grambling baseball icon Wilbert Ellis got it in 2024.
A prep All-America guard at Airline High School, McConathy coached 39 college seasons, the first 16 at Bossier Parish Community College and the last 23 seasons at Northwestern, coaching the Demons to 330 of his state-record 682 victories and three NCAA Tournament berths.
It took McConathy just two seasons to completely transform the Demons, taking his first squad to the Southland Conference Tournament final and the second, the 2000-01 team, to the program’s first NCAA Tournament and the first March Madness win in program history – a 71-67 triumph over Winthrop. That victory allowed McConathy to helped build on a Demon legacy built by his father and two uncles, all of whom starred at Northwestern.
McConathy’s father, John, was a 1951 first-round NBA Draft pick of the Syracuse Nationals. He later coached the Bossier Bearkats to the 1960 state championship and eventually served as Bossier Parish superintendent of schools for over 20 years.
“How blessed am I to have coached with people and coach players who would actually allow us to coach them and to take us to greater heights than anyone dreamed?” the younger McConathy asked. “You have to give (former Northwestern Director of Athletics) Greg Burke a tremendous amount of credit. He took a chance on hiring me, but he saw something whether he knew it or not. I had a 50-year head start on anyone coming to Northwestern because of all of the ties my dad had established in the state and at Northwestern. That gave me an advantage.”
Five years later after that first NCAA Tournament berth, McConathy’s “Demons of Destiny” delivered one of March Madness’ signature buzzer-beating upsets in 2006 when Jermaine Wallace’s late 3-pointer capped a stunning second-half comeback to lift 14th-seeded Northwestern to a victory that lives on every March in NCAA Tournament highlight packages.
McConathy’s third NCAA Tournament team came in 2013 when his Jalan West-led Southland Conference regular-season runner-ups outlasted rival Stephen F. Austin in the SLC Tournament championship game to earn its spot in the big dance. That victory in Katy, Texas, was one of seven appearances for a McConathy-coached team in the Southland Conference tournament championship game.
Those three tournaments were part of four national postseason appearances for McConathy’s Demons, who also played in the 2014 College Insider Tournament.
A member of the Louisiana Tech and NSU athletic halls of fame, McConathy also has been enshrined in the Ark-La-Tex Museum of Champions and the Northwestern State University Hall of Distinguished Educators – the latter coming after spending 23 years as a member of the university faculty.
In addition to graduating more than 90 percent of his NSU players, McConathy mentored five future Division I head coaches during his Demon tenure. Included among those who followed their leader’s footsteps to the top spot on the bench were Buzz Williams (currently at Maryland), Dave Simmons (McNeese) and Mark Slessinger (New Orleans).
Northwestern christened Mike McConathy Court at Prather Coliseum on Feb. 15, 2025, adding to his list of honors for his 43-year coaching career that began as the girls basketball coach at Airline. McConathy’s teams lived by the slogan, “The MVP of our team is our team,” something his induction into the state’s biggest sports shrine echoed.
“It’s special, but it’s special because there are so many people who helped me along the way – my parents, my teammates, my brothers and sister, my wife and my children,” McConathy said. “Every player was a part of my family because they allowed me to be part of their life and to use what God’s given me, a gift to be able to reach out to others and see the best in them. By doing that, we were able to achieve a lot of great things. It was a collective thing with so many people contributing to me to make me able to give back to them.”
McConathy’s coaching career blossomed from the ground up at Bossier Parish Community College where he built a program from scratch and led it to seven seasons of 23-plus victories and two trips to the NJCAA national tournament, including a seventh-place finish. The Cavs played their home games at Airline during McConathy’s 16 seasons and competed with great success in the Texas-dominated NCJAA Region XIV against well-established, much better funded opponents.
The BPCC program turned into a powerhouse in McConathy’s fourth season, going 24-8 in 1986-87 and making the first of 12 NJCAA Region 23 tournament appearances. That was the first of 11 seasons with at least 22 wins, two NCJAA Tournament trips, and a 53-8 record with two final top 10 national rankings before he took the Northwestern job in March 1999.
As a player, McConathy was a prep All-American guard at Airline before becoming the Southland Player of the Year in 1977 as part of a Louisiana Tech career where he averaged 20.7 points per game. Just as his coaching career circled back to his father, so did McConathy’s time as a player. He went from an undersized freshman for the Vikings to a highly-recruited guard who visited Oklahoma and LSU before his college choice came down to Louisiana Tech and his parents’ alma mater, Northwestern. The chance to play for Scotty Robertson, a coaching colleague of his father’s, helped him choose the Bulldogs after spurning offers from Dale Brown at LSU and future NBA coach John McLeod at OU.
“The playing part of my career is pretty special,” McConathy said. “To go from being a 5-foot-3, ninth grader who wanted to play because his dad was a great player and a coach, the needle’s not moving. To be able to develop into a player, nobody thought that was going to happen. I wasn’t big, and I wasn’t strong, but my work ethic carried over from being a player to being a coach.
“I remember (future Louisiana Tech head men’s basketball coach) Tommy Joe Eagles (under whom McConathy student taught at Cedar Creek in Ruston) a long time ago told me great players don’t make good coaches. The reason is they don’t have to do the little things. I was not in that category. I had to do everything I could possibly do (to succeed as a player).”
He was good enough to get to the final cut with the Chicago Bulls in an era when there were only 12 NBA teams with 12-man rosters. After a brief stint playing pro ball in Europe, he came home and went to work at Airline, starting the girls program there before becoming the architect of BPCC basketball and launching a career that has carried him to the LSHOF Class of 2026.
Contact Jason at pughj@nsula.edu