Wayne Stein, the coach of the state champion baseball team from St. Charles Catholic High School, was selected as the Allstate Sugar Bowl’s Greater New Orleans Boys’ Prep Coach of the Year for 2018-19. The Greater New Orleans Sports Awards Committee, sponsored by the Allstate Sugar Bowl, selects annual award winners in a variety of categories; it also selects Amateur Athletes of the Month and each year’s Hall of Fame class.
St. Charles Catholic won its first state title in its eighth trip to the championship game. Stein guided the Comets to a 7-4 upset of top-seed University Lab to win the Allstate Sugar Bowl/LHSAA Division II Baseball title.
“It kind of clicked to me,” Stein told WGNO-TV. “One of my players in a meeting one time that I had with him said, ‘I think you need to be harder on me.’ He was telling me I think you need to push us a little extra and I took that advice to heart. It took me two months later to realize what he was trying to tell me and I did. I started to push more and I just demanded a higher standard that I thought that they wanted.”
Stein’s sixth-seeded Comets won 17 of their final 19 games and defeated the top three seeds to win the state title.
The Greater New Orleans Sports Awards Committee began in 1957 when James Collins spearheaded a group of sports journalists to form a sports awards committee to immortalize local sports history. For 13 years, the committee honored local athletes each month. In 1970, the Sugar Bowl stepped in to sponsor and revitalize the committee, leading to the creation of the Greater New Orleans Sports Hall of Fame in 1971, honoring 10 legends from the Crescent City in its first induction class. While adding the responsibility of selecting Hall of Famers, the committee has continued to recognize the top amateur athlete in the Greater New Orleans area each month – the honors enter their 64th year in 2020. To be eligible, an athlete must be a native of the greater New Orleans area or must compete for a team in the metropolitan region.
The Allstate Sugar Bowl has established itself as one of the premier college football bowl games, having hosted 28 national champions, 96 Hall of Fame players, 50 Hall of Fame coaches and 18 Heisman Trophy winners in its 86-year history. The 87th Allstate Sugar Bowl Football Classic, which will double as a College Football Playoff Semifinal, is scheduled to be played on January 1, 2021. In addition to football, the Sugar Bowl Committee annually invests over $1.6 million into the community through the hosting and sponsorship of sporting events, awards and clinics. Through these efforts, the organization supports and honors over 100,000 student-athletes each year, while injecting over $2.7 billion into the local economy in the last decade.
-www.AllstateSugarBowl.org-
