Straight College Men Royce And Payne Full
Lora Ceasor
Van Hedrick has been the only head softball coach in the 20-year history of the North Central Texas College program. After serving as the assistant baseball coach at NCTC for several years, he started the softball program from scratch in 1999. In his 20 years as head coach, he has only had ONE losing season, and that was the very first season. He has more than 840 victories, winning more than 65 percent of his games. That win total makes him the winningest active junior college coach in Texas, and ranks him 10th among all active NJCAA Division I coaches. His teams have won two NTJCAC Championships, three NJCAA Region V North Championships and have advanced to the NJCAA Division I National Tournament three times in a span of nine years.
Since the inception of the program, Coach Hedrick has made sure his team is actively involved in the community. Whether it be volunteering with a community playground build, reading to kindergarten students at local schools, working at a hot-air balloon festival to benefit a local hospital, or cleaning up a church playground, the Lady Lions softball team is always looking for ways to help out the community.
Since 2005, Hedrick has served as Athletic Director at NCTC. Each year, NCTC teams donate the proceeds from gate admissions to local organizations including the American Red Cross and local animal shelters and food pantries. Tens of thousands of dollars have gone to local non-profit organizations because of this program.
While attending Iowa Park High School, where he graduated in 1985, Van Hedrick was a three-sport letterman in football, basketball and baseball, and he earned All-District honors in all three sports. His pursuit of excellence on the playing field is no different in his work as the Lady Lions' first coach than it was in his playing days.
Coach Hedrick attended Vernon Regional Junior College from 1986-1988, playing shortstop and serving as a team tri-captain. After earning his Associate degree there, Hedrick attended Tarleton State University from 1988 to 1990. At Tarleton, he moved to the outfield and was used as a relief pitcher. An arm injury sidelined him for most of his junior season. During Hedrick's senior year at Tarleton, however, he was named "Comeback Player of the Year."
In 1990, Coach Hedrick earned his bachelor's degree in Criminal Justice, with a minor in Physical Education. After a year as the assistant coach at Hill College, he returned to Tarleton State and was a graduate assistant coach for two years while completing his Master of Education degree in 1992.
Coach Hedrick is married to Robyn Ruzicka Hedrick and they have three daughters: Ashley, Allison and Autumn. Robyn holds a master's degree in Early Childhood Development and teaches high school Family and Consumer Science in Lindsay, TX.
Ranger College President William J. Campion won a lot of games during his career as a basketball coach. He called even more during a 35-year period as a college referee before retiring from the court to focus on being one of the top small-college administrators in the United States.
After his playing career ended, Flowers returned to Ranger and became an assistant for his former coach. In his first season assisting his former coach, RC placed third in the national tournament and would go on to win the 1978 national championship. When Allen retired in 1985, he endorsed Flowers to take over the Rangers baseball program, of which he did and went on to win over 400 games.
While he coached future MLB players Hector Ortiz, Danny Williams and Pedro Bourbon many would say his biggest contribution to RC baseball was overseeing the construction of a new ballpark, which was named after Ranger alum and former MLB player Ellis Burks. Construction was completed in 2000 and RC still plays its home games there.
Allen was elected into the Junior College Baseball Coaches Hall of Fame in 1986. After retiring from Ranger Junior College, he took over the head coach at Tarleton State University in 1989. Over the ensuing 13 seasons, he led the Texans to consecutive 40-win seasons and was named the NAIA District 8 and Area II Coach of the Year in 1992. He helped TSU qualify for the school's first NCAA South Central Regional Tournament in 1998. Allen returned to RC to finish out his career as the Rangers athletic director.
Coach Allen was inducted into the American Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame prior to the 2000 season. He retired from coaching in 2002 and was inducted into the Tarleton Athletics Hall of Fame in 2009.
Butler remains very much the center of all things at Ranger College, where he attends many home sporting events and also serves on the Ranger College Board of Regents as Vice-Chairman. Of his many accomplishments he acknowledges one of his best, which is being married to his lovely wife Rowena for over 56 years. The Butlers raised three children and have five grandchildren.
Coach Sanders coached 41 years, 20 at the junior college level and 21 at the high school level. Coach Sanders had a junior college career record of 443 - 182 at Eastern Oklahoma State College and NMJC. His overall career record including high school was 836 - 403.
The coaching resume established by Sanders is recognized in his home state of Oklahoma as well. Having led multiple teams to the Oklahoma High School State Tournament along with an exceptional career leading the Lady Mountaineers of Eastern Oklahoma State College which included a trip to the NJCAA National Tournament. Coach Sanders was selected as the 1996 Oklahoma High School Coach of the Year and was inducted to the Oklahoma Girls Basketball Coaches Hall of Fame in 2011.
Prior to starting my seventeen years of research on the history of college rodeo, I spent an initiation period of about eight years. When I was hired to teach English at New Mexico Junior College (NMJC), it was a young, robust institution in an oil-rich county one hundred miles long and forty miles wide, with most of the county being ranch country. Under the strong leadership of John Sheppard, vice president for instruction, NMJC provided the environment for creative ideas and supported them with wise direction and encouragement.
So that NMJC could have a rodeo program, the ranchers and area rodeo groups built an arena and gave it to the college. I replaced the English instructor and rodeo club sponsor, so I was asked to do both, also. Since they assured me that there was no one else available, I, after making calls to recruit help, agreed to do it. The fall of 1977, when I became the rodeo club sponsor, attorney and NMJC board member Ray Potter, who twenty years later became my brother-in-law, directed the idea of moving the NMJC rodeo program into the athletic department so that it could be funded, resulting in my acquiring the title of rodeo coach.
While I was a rodeo coach and an English instructor at New Mexico Junior College, NIRA commissioner Tim Corfield initiated me into the field of writing rodeo articles, illustrated with photos, for the national college rodeo newspaper as well as for other national magazines, such as Western Horseman. Tim recommended me to Randy Witte, Western Horseman publisher, who offered me writing opportunities and enthusiastically promoted the NIRA alumni association and the writing of this book. After I presented several papers on college rodeo to the Texas Folklore Society (TFS), Dr. Francis Abernethy, TFS secretary and editor, asked me to write the entry on rodeo for The New Handbook of Texas, an encyclopedia.
As the executive director with museum displays to create, I called on Museum of New Mexico curators for advice, and they welcomed me for a week to learn some basics. Then, I started research on ranchers and county rodeo champions. While doing research on a former college cowgirl who said that she had won an NIRA all-around championship (she had), I found that the NIRA had limited records on early-day NIRA cowgirls. In fact, the cowgirl national champions were not listed in the national records prior to 1956. During the first few years, the nomadic national office, run by college students, winnowed the files down to almost nothing, leaving them incomplete. No records existed on the twenty-nine years of college rodeo history prior to the organization of the National Intercollegiate Rodeo Association, which is the only college rodeo association.
I discovered that the only sources of information on college rodeo before the founding of the NIRA were from the cowboys and cowgirls and their scrapbooks with newspaper clippings and rodeo programs. As I called people, they started expressing a desire to have an NIRA alumni association, so in 1992 one of the alumni, Betty Sims Solt, and I organized the NIRA Alumni (NIRAA), which meets annually at the College National Finals Rodeo (CNFR). The members of this group helped verify that some national records were incorrect or incomplete. The alumni also filled in many history blanks, information that could not be found in printed material.
As a coach, I started attending college rodeos in 1977 in the Southwest Region, which included the colleges and universities from Fort Worth to San Angelo down to the Big Bend country up to the Texas Panhandle, and at that time, all of New Mexico. Along the way, I married a rodeo coach, John Mahoney from Sul Ross State University, who took a coaching job at Vernon Regional Junior College. After I quit coaching, I continued going to the Southwest Region rodeos with my coach husband and to every CNFR since 1979, making it easy to connect with present and past cowboys and cowgirls since rodeo people have an intricate networking.
I started my research by collecting every book on rodeo that I could find. There are no books on the history of college rodeo and few on professional rodeo. In my search, I started recording interviews with former NIRA members and champions; many of those more than 150 people are now deceased. Without them, countless questions would have gone unanswered.
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