Many of the athletes who competed on Bob Cole's hugely-successful UL track and field teams remember the different "motivations" he used during his remarkable 21-year career.

"Whenever anybody violated team rules, he'd take them in one of those old school cars down Highway 182 toward New Iberia," said Galen LaBauve, a sprinter on two conference championship teams. "He'd make them get out and run in front of the car, and yelled if you stop I'm running over you. That cured a lot of people from breaking curfew."

"He had us up on a levee one morning after the NCAA cross country regional," said distance runner Claude Revels. "I can still hear him to this day in that gruff voice, '... bunch of slackers.'"

"We were working on starts one day and he was really close to the lane, about three feet from the blocks," LaBauve said. "I was thinking why's he standing that close with the starting pistol when he gave us the take your marks and set. I jumped the gun and he shot me twice. Those little pieces from the blanks still came out, and they hurt."

Unconventional to say the least, but obviously effective. Before he was through, the Sulphur native had taken a dormant track program and turned it into a conference powerhouse. When he retired in 1984, Cole had won more conference titles than any UL coach in any sport at the time – 13, including six outdoor track (there was no conference indoor meets at the time) and seven cross country. That included his final four years when the Cajuns were not a member of any conference.

"He was an extremely good motivator," said quarter-miler Ed Domingue, who was part of Cole's first UL team in 1964. "He was demanding, but he was interesting and he was also funny. He was like a magnet, he just attracted people, and he was always happy."

The numbers and the impact are the biggest reasons that Cole will be inducted into the UL Athletic Hall of Fame on Friday as part of the university's Homecoming celebration, one day before UL meets Sun Belt rival Arkansas State in the annual Homecoming game. He will be inducted along with baseball's Hunter Moody and Eddie Mouton, softball standout Stacie Gremillion, football standout Elijah McGuire and soccer's Yazmin Montoya Gutierrez at the annual induction ceremony at the UL Student Union Ballroom on McKinley St.

Cole was a taskmaster, and had to be. His first UL team finished dead last in the Gulf States Conference. Two years later, a Cajun team with limited scholarships and heavy with walk-ons from the Acadiana region won the GSC title, and added two more in the next two years.

The NAIA's national Coach of the Year in his fifth season in 1967, Cole was universally beloved by those who competed for him.

"The only way to describe it was a dad-son relationship," said the late Pat Arceneaux, captain of Cole's first UL team and later his only-ever assistant coach. "My dad died when I was a kid, so he became that to me."

When Cole passed away in January of 2007, the former athletes he coached formed a virtual parade to honor him after his battle with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the plasma cells in bone marrow.

"He'd been in a lot of pain in the last months," said the late Stewart Blue, who came to UL as a discus thrower and left as a standout hurdler. "But you wouldn't know if you went to see him. In his way, he was still teaching the important lessons in life."

"He was like a father to some of us, that's the way we looked at him," LaBauve said. "He was the type of guy that we could tell him anything. Sometimes he'd leave us with a joke, but sometimes you could tell that what we thought was important and he took it very seriously."

"He was like my daddy," said All-American sprinter Harold Porter at Cole's funeral. "When my father died, I didn't feel the loss like I felt today."

Cole coached four individual national champions and 26 All-Americans. Among them was John McDonnell, a six-time All-American distance runner who went on to build the top track program in the country at Arkansas – 42 NCAA team championships – and often credited Cole for lessons he learned.

The individual honors aside, it was team championships that were the most important to Cole and his squads.

"We were all very, very close," LaBauve said, "and we put a lot on each other to do the best we could, always with the idea that we were going to win the conference championship. That was the one and only goal."

"He knew how to place people where they could produce the most points," Domingue said. "He knew his competition extremely well and he used that and placed us where we did the most good. When you take a program that hadn't won in 20 years and you start winning time after time, he had to be doing something right. He attracted good athletes, but more important he got the most out of them. He always had us peaking at the right time."