‘We want the ball’

Walking down the hall to one of the practice rooms inside DeBose Hall, one can’t help but to take a glance at a man standing inside with a guitar strapped across his chest concentrated on the sheet music that sits on top of an upright piano. A man that is not a familiar face within the walls of the academics, but one that has appeared at every home basketball game this season.
“I was at the very first to the last (home game),” said Adolph Randall, a New Orleans evacuee. “I arrived early at the games. No one was in attendance, it was scarce. Only a handful was there.”
Randall was the voice of the inventive chants, “Give us the ball”, “Call timeout”, and “We want a basket” at the Jaguars home basketball games this season. A former member of Southern University of New Orleans track team, Randall stated that even if he wasn’t a part of the team physically he could still be apart of the team by supporting them.
“There wasn’t anyone in the stands,” Randall said of SUNO basketball games. “No one was there for the first few games, just me. I was there to cheer the team on.”
His attendance to the Baton Rouge basketball games did not go unnoticed. He traveled with the Six-Man Club to Birmingham for the Southwestern Athletic Conference tournament to cheer on the men and women’s basketball team. During their championship celebration, sophomore forward Ralph Hishaw called him from the stands to the floor and members of the women’s team chanted “Give him a shirt, give him a shirt.”
“I felt honored to be called to the floor,” Randall said. “Stood in the background, I was thinking maybe they didn’t appreciate me as well, or I was wondering if I was taken for granted. Regardless, whether they take me for granted or not, we’re not going to let those other teams beat us in our gym.”
Randall lived in the lower ninth ward of New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina washed upon the banks of Louisiana. Born in a military hospital in Manhattan, Randall moved to Louisiana when he was about a year old with his parents; whom are originally from the Crescent City.
Randall stayed in the Superdome at the beginning of evacuation before being moved to a town outside of Dallas, then on to a cousin’s in Virginia before deciding to come back to Louisiana. He states that a professor at SUNO contacted him about graduate studies while they were housed on the Baton Rouge campus.
When SUNO returned to New Orleans he decided to stay. Randall is also a musician. He began playing the guitar right after Katrina and has been playing piano on and off since childhood. He is learning classical and gospel music. He was offered music lessons and felt that it would be wise to stay here and study under the faculty at SUBR.
“A lot, it helps a lot,” Randall said about the soothing comfort of playing the guitar after the storm. “However, I’m here to study. Hopefully, Southern will help me achieve to get my teaching certification in elementary schools.”
He has earned a degree in Elementary Education from SUNO and would like to get his teaching certificate to purse his dreams of attaining a doctoral degree in Educational Psychology. He credits his desire for teaching from his mother, a former first grade teacher.
Randall also attends the baseball and softball games and can’t wait until football and volleyball begins. Not revealing his age, he stated that he is here to help Southern and wants to set an example to the students and the people here.
“Before the athletic events, our main focus is our academics,” Randall said. “But we can support our teams. I try to encourage the students that the facts that this is our university and whatever the team does, it is a reflection of us. We should try to represent our university well.”