About the Writer
Carl Dubois began his career as a sportswriter in 1983 as a correspondent for the American Press in Lake Charles, La., his hometown. Two years later he became a full-time writer, and in 1988 he took the lead role on the paper’s coverage of area high schools. It was during this period he became more acquainted with Charles Vicknair, whose coaching career he followed years before becoming a journalist. Carl also covered the high school career and senior college season of Blayne Rush, who played for Vicknair at Sam Houston High School before becoming an All-Southland Conference lineman at McNeese State University (Rush created CoachVicknair.com to help promote the legacy of his former coach and mentor). Carl took over coverage of McNeese sports for the American Press in 1993, and his last assignment for the paper was at the 1997 Division I-AA national championship game between McNeese and Youngstown State University.
He left a few weeks later to work for The Times in Shreveport, where he wrote feature stories and columns about amateur, high school, college and pro sports and worked on a number of enterprise projects. Early in the 1999 football season, he moved to Baton Rouge to cover LSU sports for The Advocate. He stayed at the paper until September 2008, when he left to begin a 14-month period of freelance work. Carl wrote for the Baton Rouge Business Report, the Baton Rouge Area Foundation’s quarterly magazine, Currents, and was a correspondent for several newspapers throughout the Southeastern Conference coverage area. He wrote feature stories for game programs at SEC championship events, began a blog for his hometown paper, the American Press, and took a new approach to writing about sports for an LSU-themed Web site called TigerDroppings.com.
Carl began writing the feature story about Charles Vicknair for CoachVicknair.com during his period of freelance work and finished it a month after becoming associate editor of Tiger Rag, a magazine with companion Web site devoted to coverage of LSU sports. You can contact him at cdubois@coachvicknair.com.
