Ouachita Stories

Ouachita has been a home away from home for every student who’s lived in campus housing. Every year for Tiger basketball student-athletes, it’s also a home away from home for the holidays.

Since their season begins in early November, teams spend nearly all of Thanksgiving and Christmas break in Arkadelphia practicing. That’s not a typical holiday vibe, but it has its own recollections, traditions and distinct brand of family.

Brett Rogers ’90 remembers. Rogers transferred to Ouachita in the spring of his freshman year and walked on to former Coach Bill Vining’s 1986 squad. Vining is a ’51 Ouachita alum.

“The basketball team ended up becoming my social club. It’s not a huge group of people – 15, maybe 20,” Rogers said. “We spent every Thanksgiving and Christmas together, which means there’d be two or three weeks where we were the only people on campus. There wasn’t a lot going on in Arkadelphia. That was back in the old VHS tape days – we watched episodes of Andy Griffith until we were blue in the face.”

There were always shared meals – sometimes at the Vinings’ home, sometimes in the cafeteria – and always gigantic appetites.

“They hated to see us coming on all-you-can-eat Tuesday nights at the Waffle House,” Rogers said.

Weightlifting, drills and a lot of running were packed into those practice sessions. Rogers was happy to leave the running behind after he graduated from Ouachita. These days, he stays in shape playing competitive pickleball.

But that basketball brotherhood also afforded him friendships, memories and a Ouachita experience he continues to value deeply. This makes sense for Rogers: a family man who operates a family business, who prioritizes relationships and wouldn’t think twice about going out of his way to help an old friend.

Rogers is president of Capital Technology Group in Little Rock, which provides technical support, consulting and imaging equipment to small and mid-size businesses around the state. He works with his brothers Byron (vice president) and Bryce (customer service representative). Before a spring rebrand to better define its scope, the company was Capital Business Machines – a Small Business Administration Top Family-Owned Business of the Year.

The Rogers brothers also got to work for many years with their dad, the late Bill Rogers, who launched the family’s first venture in 1975 when he started City Business Machines.

“He was quite respected because he did business the right way,” Rogers said. “He cared about people and was always real big on treating them well.”

As a student, Rogers found his dad’s example reinforced at Ouachita. As a Ouachita trustee, he sees it today.

“While Ouachita emphasizes academics, it’s much more than books, papers and formulas. It prepares students to become well-rounded, to face the real world,” he said. “There’s a common thread that runs through the campus, the coaches, the professors, that helped prepare me to run a business and to live life right. Without sounding too cliché, it can be summed up in one statement: ‘People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.’ At Ouachita, people care.”

Rogers and his family are longtime active members of Geyer Springs First Baptist Church in Little Rock. He and his wife, Shelly, have two grown children, Carson Rogers and Callie (Rogers) Andrus ’21.

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By Felley (Nall) Lawson '88, communications & marketing manager