Inside the Norco home of Marty Luquet and Lori Lyons, there’s a wealth of sports knowledge and experience that few could boast to match – and they’ve got it covered from different angles.
There’s a husband who has more than 500 victories as a prep head baseball coach under his belt, notched over a storied career that came to a close following his final season at Riverside in the spring of this year. There’s a wife who cemented herself as synonymous with River Parishes sports coverage during her decorated career as a journalist, culminating with her enshrinement into the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame in the summer of 2023.
The two are each officially retired now. And they have stories to tell.
Which is the inspiration for That Sports Couple, the name of their new podcast that’s set to debut the week of the preseason football jamborees – that falls on the final week of August.
“It’s going to be a bit of a looser format where we talk about some of the things we’ve seen and experienced over the years,” Lyons said. “A lot of people used to make fun of me because I brought my husband everywhere – well, I don’t want to go out to Farmerville, to Iowa, that little dot on the map all by myself, so he went along with me. We’ve had a lot of adventures together.”
Likewise, Lyons was in the stands to support Luquet on so many of his days in the dugout as head coach of Destrehan and other schools. That said, as a sportswriter she was not permitted to cover those games due to their relationship.
Although, there was that one time …
“The only time I’d ever interviewed him,” Lyons recalled. “It was a crazy day, a Destrehan playoff game that kept getting pushed back and pushed back by the rain. They moved it here, then over there, and they finally got it started at 9 o’clock at night. Nobody was going to go to the game from the newspaper to start covering a game at 9, and I was there already … I felt like, we’ve got to have a quote from the coach on how that all affected his team. So I said I have to get a quote – that was the only time.”
This podcast won’t be an interview format, as both Lyons and Luquet have plenty of stories to tell. Their regular back-and-forth conversations over their shared love of sports made a podcast a natural fit, as well as the uniqueness they bring as hosts – while many podcasts match up a journalist with a coach or former coach to host, not very many are husband and wife.
“We thought it would be pretty cool to have, not a solid Friday night breakdown of games, but a laid-back back-and-forth. We’ll talk about the football games, the big performances and what happened, but it won’t be hardcore football,” Luquet said.
Lyons noted their unique perspectives on the sports world that bring their exchanges to life so often.
“He loves the X’s and O’s, while I’m more interested in the people,” Lyons said. “What it’s like sitting in the stands with Archie Manning at West St. John basketball game. He’s locked on to the gameplan. As a writer, I never really tried to second guess the coach, like why in the world would you run that play? It was more, tell me how you won the game, or what you would do differently than drawing up plays and such.”
In other ways, they’re plenty alike.
“We’re both sports nuts to begin with,” Lyons said.
Luquet added, “Or just plain nuts.”
Lyons had pitched the idea of podcast to her husband for a long time, but the first version she had in mind did not involve her.
“It was actually for he and Daniel,” Lyons said. “A baseball coach and a football coach. I even had a name for it – Luquet Us. But (Daniel) kind of raised an eyebrow and said no. So Marty and I got the idea that we should do it together. And we kind of brought it up to people and they kept saying ‘Oh, that would be great.’ We’re retired, so what do we do? Hey, let’s do this.”
They’ve done a few test runs so far and have been getting advice from some of the experienced people in the podcasting-verse that they know. Daughter Lora is going to help produce it.
“We’re sharing these stories and we get excited and we’re interrupting one another. We talk kind of like an old married couple – because we are one,” Lyons said.
Of course, it isn’t the first time behind a microphone for Lyons. And even though his coaching career tied up most of his time – Luquet has a bit of experience in that department as well.
For a time in the 1990s, Luquet called Hahnville and Destrehan football games as a color commentator for what at the time was WADU FM radio.
“More people knew me from doing that than my coaching career or what I had done with parks and recreation, at that point in my life,” Luquet said. “I did that for about a year-and-a-half … that was the first time I was away from coaching for a while, and that gave me the chance to keep preparing for Friday nights, like I had been coaching football. It was kind of a natural.”
Helping a bit with the show’s branding is its unofficial logo – a cartoon caricature of the couple drawn by Chris Brown, the artist for the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame.
They noted they’d like to feature other notable sports couples from the region – be it coaches or players and their spouses. That is planned as a recurring segment.
The show is planned to run during from jamboree week through the state championship games of football season, then beginning back up at the start of baseball season.
“That Sports Couple” has a Facebook page with Instagram and TikTok pages planned, and the podcast will be available anywhere podcasts can be found.
“We hope people give it a shot and laugh at us and with us, and that we entertain them,” Lyons said.
