Meet The Neighbors: Carlos Roldan Takes Pride in His Players
Carlos Roldan came to Baton Rouge from Argentina more than ten years ago. He started playing tennis at the age of nine, and started competing by age 13. By the time he was 18 he was competing semi-pro and coaching on the side, which took away from his training time. He loved to coach so much that he decided to stop competing and coach full time. In 1998, after coaching for many years, it turns out he had something new to learn.
"By accident I received a flier for something called wheelchair tennis that I’ve never seen before, even though I’ve played tennis all my life, never seen before. So I approached the person who gave me the flier and that’s how it started," Roldan says. "I went there one time to see their practice and I really was impressed with what they do and how they do it, and the coach told me 'Would you be interested in coaching some players?' and I said 'Well, absolutely, but I don’t know much about this, and he told me 'If you know how to coach tennis you can start' and that’s how it started."
Now, Roldan coaches wheelchair tennis every Saturday at BREC’s Highland Park. He’s also helped kickstart similar programs elsewhere in the state. He teaches beginners, intermediate and advanced, with students as young as six, and as old as 65.
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Basically it’s the same game, we just need to adjust to the disability of everyone of your clients or players or trying to help them out to [make] the best out of their disability in favor of the sport.
I take pride [in] my players, I think I call them my players because they’re kind of part of my life. I always see them as athletes, I don’t give them any privileges, I don’t do anything for them, I just show them what they need to do and they need to go with it.
One of the players that I work with for many years, his name is Shane Theriot. He was from Lafayette and he was in a clinic I was giving to get a program started there, and after we became friends he worked really hard, he became one of my players and from the area, he became 100 in the world.
My very first wheelchair tennis student, his name was Landon Meyer, he was Smiley Anders’ grandson. And I didn’t know that, I didn’t know who Smiley Anders was, and he came or the first time to tennis lesson. He never knew he could play wheelchair tennis and we started playing tennis.
The following week, he showed up with sunglasses. Which was very unusual for me. And I looked at him and I said “Landon, what’s going on with you?” And he looked at me and he said “What do you mean?” and I said “You’re wearing sunglasses” and he said “I’m wearing sunglasses like you, I’m a tennis player now.”
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Getting to know Carlos Roldan, wheelchair tennis coach at BREC’s Highland Park. This has been Meet the Neighbors. Tell us who we should meet next. e-mail us at [email protected] or go to meettheneighbors.wrkf.org.
Franklin Brown has owned Bayou Café at 5688 Airline Highway in Scotlandville since 2000.
Brown says his first love is Southern University, where he graduated in 1975. He says the entire North Baton Rouge community comes in close second. In his last 14 years of business, Bayou Café has become something of a meeting place. In the mornings, the place is slammed.
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I always kind of had a passion for cooking. I never thought that I had in my mind that I would go into the food business, after coming out of school. But driving around in the community there was not a restaurant that could seat fifty people out here and we eat a lot and a place to hold a meeting.
One of the things about Bayou Café, you know, you come here and you’re going to get good food and you be informed about what’s going on in the community. You learn about politics, you learn about the people that represent you, and the people that are planning to run, you know who. So a lot of people when they get ready to launch their campaign, they come in here and ask my opinion because we’re somewhat like a weather forecast, you know, we can forecast what’s going on because we communicate with the people here. They give us the feedback and we pass it onto them.
Everybody comes here. I guess if they’re in Baton Rouge and they’re important, they’ve been to Bayou Café. People from the Obama campaign, during his first term, they met right at this place and after meeting here, I met some important people with his campaign and in 2009 I was invited to the White House.
If they're in Baton Rouge and they're important, they've been to Bayou Café.
All of the politicians, the clergy. Like today, every Thursday, all the preachers meet here for breakfast.
People come into the place in the morning and they’re eating breakfast and every morning they’ll come in - I call it barber shop talk...you know you go to the barber shop, you go to the beauty shop, everybody talks. Or when they come in they sit around a table they eat breakfast, they’re going to talk
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Tell us about someone remarkable in your community. Get in touch with us via Facebook or Twitter, e-mail us at [email protected]
In a cozy little duplex in Beauregard Town, Tess Brunet runs a neighborhood record store.
The Houma native opened the store with her partner Patrick -- he’s from Maine. And he’s the one who came up with the name, Langiappe Records.
“He was so enamored by South Louisiana and New Orleans and he’s discovering all these things about this region and you know Lagniappe is you know it’s normal to me I know what that is, people anywhere else besides here they see that word and they’re like ‘how do you say that?" she jokes. "He fell in love with this area.”
After touring the country as a musician, Brunet landed in New Orleans, but she kept being drawn back to Baton Rouge.
It’s kind of the opposite of what people do; they usually live in Baton Rouge and always go to New Orleans, I was living in New Orleans and always going to Baton Rouge. There’s a lot of young people who are trying to make their city better and that’s infectious.
It’s a vibe too, you come in here and it’s a vibe - a converted house in Beauregard Town, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Baton Rouge which hopefully, they’re building up around it, it’s going to be more pedestrian and biking friendly - we want to be your neighborhood record shop, literally.
I started collecting vinyl - the earliest I can remember is probably five or six years old... And I had older siblings that were much older, and our age gap was drastically different. I was three and four years old when the youngest - next to youngest - was in high school. And she had her own car. So she was out hanging out, you know, cruisin' the mall parking lot, man. And so that left her record collection to me. And I did that with my dad's collection too. And I know a lot of people when CDs came out where like oh throw their vinyl out! CDs are the wave of the future! But I never did that, I held on to all my vinyl.
I didn’t want to operate as an online thing. It’s boring, there’s no interaction with people, you can’t share your love of vinyl with someone else, you can’t geek out to a record and like pull it out and play it, put your hands on it and check out the liner notes and check out the artwork and someone standing next to you feels the same way about this particular record and you just trip out on it. You can’t do that online, you know?
I think what you should get out of your local record shop is a music education. You should walk out of there having some piece of knowledge that you didn’t have before you walked in. I just firmly believe that. I feel like that’s a true record shop.
Tell us about someone remarkable in your community. Get in touch with us via Facebook or Twitter, e-mail us at [email protected]
Everyone can think of a character they know. Someone who puts their mark on the community. Someone who just has a colorful personality. Someone you just want to know more about.
Meet The Neighbors introduces you to some of the remarkable people who live and work in the Baton Rouge area.
People like Tess Brunet, who has lived in New York, Los Angeles and many other cities, but chose to start a business in Baton Rouge. "There’s a lot of young people who are trying to make their city better, and that’s infectious," she says. When she returned home to New Orleans after four years as the drummer for Deadboy and The Elephantmen, she found herself spending all her weekends in Baton Rouge. She and her partner Patrick Hodgkins opened Lagniappe Records last year.
Do you know someone like Tess? We want to meet them and hear their story.
Email us at [email protected] with "Meet The Neighbors" in the subject line or tweet at us.
