Posted 1:26 am Sunday, January 22, 2012
Good Things Come In III's At Baylor
Something special is happening at Baylor University. It seems the school has found a recipe for sports excellence. The evidence is overwhelming when you consider the success of the athletics programs across all sports but particularly in football, and the high rankings of the men and women's basketball teams.
The Heisman trophy going to Robert Griffin III was something many people could agree on no matter how occasionally connected with athletics. What made him being the recipient even more special was the humility he demonstrated throughout the season and the credit he deflected to his teammates and the school.
Perry Jones III and Brittney Griner are the envy of every basketball coach in the country and both are legitimate national player of the year candidates.
Great coaches are always a key component of excellence in athletics and always will be. But there has to be something bigger, perhaps the athletic director or the president of the school, making this comprehensive contagion of excellence permeate the water in the Brazos.
You see these things gather steam in organizations and communities. The success of each team sport seems to be building an overall culture of excellence in Baylor athletics. People gravitate to such things and as the analogy goes, "when the water in the harbor rises, all boats rise."
The fans get a piece of the action too. The joy of watching your school in the limelight may be closest thing to watching your own kid win it all. Everybody wins when everybody wins.
Sometimes these phenomenons become dynasties as we have seen in the great John Wooden teams at UCLA or the Mike Krzyzewski era at Duke.
Players want to play in an arena of excellence and have their skills honed at the feet of the masters of such excellence.
It is hard to say whether Baylor is building a dynasty or if this alignment of wonder is a short-term movement.
Time will prove out such things. More encouraging than their success on the field of play is the outstanding academic results achieved by their athletes. Pair those results and you'll have parents across the country clamoring to have their children in the program.
You may wonder why I wanted to discuss this stuff today. Well, you can see patterns emerge that could or should be repeatable. For instance, there are some communities in the state which seem to have had similar success in athletics at the high school level.
Southlake Carroll is a great example across all sports of producing teams which seem to compete for and win state championships and send kids to the ranks of professional athletics regularly.
Aledo is another example of a district with great success in football recently which seems to be headed toward dynasty proportions.
Could we aspire to the same in Tyler? What would it take? Would it be as simple as hiring the people from those districts to run our programs? Maybe. Maybe not.
The real question becomes not how good we have been but how excellent could we be? Who would lead the charge And by the way, let's not just focus on the field of play but the whole package.
Mind, body and spirit must be considered to have comprehensive excellence. It is my belief we could have the most excellent band students, the most excellent debate students -- the possibilities are endless.
Robert Griffin III, Perry Jones III and Brittney Griner represent the excellence going on at Baylor in their respective athletics endeavors.
Maybe in 10 years the names of the young people doing the same things at Baylor and other centers of excellence will come from places such as Tyler and East Texas because we made a renewed commitment to excellence.
It could happen.
