Dave WilsonNov 5, 2025, 07:00 AM ETCloseDave Wilson is a college football reporter. He previously worked at The Dallas Morning News, San Diego Union-Tribune and Las Vegas Sun.Follow on X
Kent Broussard, Dicharry’s new neighbor, was a retiree who had just moved to Baton Rouge determined to fulfill his life’s dream: to join the Golden Band from Tigerland at LSU. And he was learning to play, of all things, the tuba.
Dicharry tells the story in the Broussards’ living room, alongside his wife Dawn, Broussard’s wife Cheryl and fellow neighbors Lynette Wilks and Barry Searles. They all immediately leap to Kent’s defense. He wasn’t so bad at the tuba that his playing was confused with moose noises, they say. It was just that confusion was natural; nobody in the neighborhood was expecting someone to be playing a tuba at all.
They say it takes a village to raise a child. But it turns out it takes this neighborhood, on the southern edge of Baton Rouge, to raise a 66-year-old tuba player. It was here that Broussard serenaded the neighbors from his porch, marched around the streets in a weighted vest to get his stamina up and avoided the heat by playing early in the morning and late at night.
He soon became the envy of the neighborhood. He had a lifelong goal and made it happen. He is now a member of the LSU band, playing the fight songs on Saturday nights at Tiger Stadium. Welcome to the Tiger Tuba Kent Fan Club.
“I’ve had ’em in my head for 60 years and now I’m getting the opportunity to play them,” Broussard said of the tunes.
Since the 1960s, Broussard had gone to LSU football games and loved hearing the band play. In the 1980s, when he and Cheryl started dating, he would take her to LSU games and make her stay after the game and watch the band play. So five years ago, before he retired, he emailed the band director and asked what he would have to do to join the band.
“It started really 30 years ago when I made a commitment to myself that I wanted to do something that really no one else had ever done,” Broussard said. “I just love the band. And I didn’t look at it like, because of my age, I don’t think I should try out. That has really never crossed my mind. I’m young at heart.”
“To watch that man train and persevere through this heat and do what he does on the daily has just simply been amazing,” said Lynette Wilks, who lives behind the Broussards. “My granddaughter is 11 and was out riding the bike in the neighborhood. She came in and threw the bike down. She said, ‘Lulu, there’s a man marching around in the street playing a tuba.’
In mid-to-late August, Broussard was invited to the band’s preseason camp, a four-day long audition where he said they “learn the LSU way of playing,” along with their marching styles and do some sight-reading of music. Mostly, he said, it was a way to make sure the culture fit was right for band members.
There are 325 members in the LSU band, including the color guard and the Golden Girls dance line, with roughly 275 members who are strictly musicians. There are always more freshmen looking to join the band than there are spots. There are no guarantees.
So the entire gang waited anxiously for the final band roster to be announced. Once they got the news, everyone went crazy. Tiger Tuba Kent was officially a Tiger.
“It makes us all feel good,” Searles said. “You get to a certain age and then you feel like you’re done, but we really don’t feel like we’re done. So it feels good to be accepted in the world.”
Broussard became a media darling. He did TV appearances on “Good Morning America” and the SEC Network, did interviews with NPR and PBS, and appeared on “The Kelly Clarkson Show” just this week. Dawn said she was never bothered by the tuba; it was the notifications on the group chat and the neighborhood board cheering Kent on that would wake her up at night.
“We had gone from being together all the time, which was a little too much, to all the way over here,” she said of Kent’s retirement. “I’ll see him 20 or 30 minutes, and then he’ll need to go study.”
They go to dinner on Fridays and make the most of their time. But seeing Kent get to live his dream and become an inspiration for others has been worth it. She said she has already told him it’s totally up to him and she’ll support him if he wants to do it again next year.
Every time they show Broussard’s image on the video board at Tiger Stadium, the crowd erupts. Dawn, Barry and Lynette cried the first time they saw it happen.
But one place where it has already made a big difference is in the Broussards’ neighborhood. They’re just happy to be along for the ride, helping encourage their local celebrity/tuba player.
The year hasn’t gone according to plan for the Tigers on the field. But in the stands, they’re one of the best stories of the season. And Tiger Tuba Kent likes to keep the positivity.
It’s a quintessential Louisiana tale. The Broussards were among the first Acadian families (later shortened to Cajun) to settle in Louisiana two centuries ago, arriving from France via Canada where they were expelled after rebelling against the British. Kent Broussard, born in Cajun country in Lafayette, got an accounting degree and MBA from Southeastern Louisiana in Hammond and played trumpet in the band for two years. He went to work for Sazerac Spirits, named for a cocktail first invented in New Orleans, then was instrumental in the creation of the Sazerac House on the city’s Canal Street. He and Cheryl lived in LaPlace along the Mississippi River, but after two floods and Kent’s retirement, they decided to pick up and move to Baton Rouge so he could do the most Louisiana thing possible: Join the LSU band.
There were challenges. First, he would have to be a student. Second, competition was going to be tight, and he would have to learn to march, which most of the students had done for years in middle and high school. There would likely be too much competition on trumpet, he was told. But the world has fewer tuba players than trumpet players and the LSU band loves having a robust tuba line — after having 24 sousaphones last year, they decided to accept 32 this year. So that’s where Broussard decided to direct his energies.
CloseDave Wilson is a college football reporter. He previously worked at The Dallas Morning News, San Diego Union-Tribune and Las Vegas Sun.Follow on X
“He said, ‘A wounded moose,'” Dicharry said. “I said, ‘We ain’t got no moose around.'”
“You can’t get much more south Louisiana than that,” he joked.
Kent thought it was awesome. Cheryl had another reaction: “I put him on a 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. curfew,” she said, laughing.
“This has just been incredible for all of us,” Wilks said.