Goodbye to an angler who shaped young men’s lives

Saturday’s early light rain ended about mid-morning, prompting at least one outdoorsman to say that Donald Batiste might think it’d be a good time to be on the water, either in or around the Atchafalaya Basin or Vermilion Bay.

Richard Lewis of New Iberia, 71, nodded his head and agreed that his long-time friend and frequent fishing buddy would indeed think so, too. Lewis’ eyes were moist as he stood in the back of St. Nicholas Catholic Church in Patoutville, where family and friends attended the visitation and funeral Mass for Batiste.

Batiste died Oct. 1 at age 75. He fell and hit his head and there were serious complications, his friend Nathaniel Mitchell of New Iberia told me two days earlier, knowing how much the man meant to me during and after my sports writing days at The Daily Iberian. 

Batiste used to take his buddies fishing, most of the time to Henderson Lake or Vermilion Bay. While he was regarded as a successful angler who loved to fish, his mark on the community was as the head coach of the Yellow Jackets at New Iberia Senior High.

He made a lasting impression on me, the way he guided the young men wearing black-and-gold on the basketball court. He was an inspiration.

“I talk to the kids all the time — well, they’re men now — and they say the same thing. He was an inspiration. I’ll never forget him,” Richard said Saturday before the funeral Mass at 11 a.m.

“He was a helluva coach and won a lot. But what he did with those kids,” he said, was  most important.

“He believed in instruction. I still remember him saying, ‘Play the way you were taught in practice.’ He was a stickler for that. And when they did it, they were successful.”

Win or lose, Batiste always took the time to talk after a game and he told it like it was. Mostly, he and his teams won — six district titles, two state quarterfinal appearances and trips  to the Top 28 in 1991, 1993 and 1994.

What struck me the most was how much “Coach Bat,” as he was known, cared about his players and the track and field athletes he coached from 1978 to 1994, which was his last year at NISH and, ironically, my last year as sports editor before moving to the news desk.

After one game, the national Coach of the Year finalist in 1992 met with me in a hallway to talk about the game. His voice trembled as he wrestled with the emotion of a serious, season-ending injury to one of his players.

I’ll never forget the sight. He had his back to the wall and leaned against it, his right fist clenched and bumping the wall, bumping the wall as he fought back tears.

He wasn’t fretting because a starter would be out. He was genuinely concerned about the health and well-being of one of the many young men he coached.

Many people are fighting back tears, or trying, this weekend. Goodbye, coach.

DON SHOOPMAN is outdoors editor of The Daily Iberian.