458: We Keep Fighting

Part Two: We Keep Fighting

There’s just something about this place. 

Every school in the country has some version of that statement prepared in their material for prospective students. If you have a child that’s attempting to decide which college they’re going to attend, you’re intimately familiar with these sentiments. The brochures are on your kitchen counter right now. Every school tries to convince you just how special they are, just how unique the college experience is on their campus. The difference between Texas A&M and all those other schools? 

Some may boast of prowess bold of the school they think so grand, but there’s a spirit can ne’er be told… It’s the Spirit of Aggieland.

That spirit isn’t something we really have to tell you about. It’s something you feel in the air. It all ties back to our history as a military school, preparing generation after generation of young people to serve their country in battle. Texas A&M was built with the express purpose of crafting individuals of character, ready at a moment’s notice to step onto the battlefield and fight with everything they had. It isn’t what we say, it’s who we are. That’s why a college sophomore in 1922 was willing to come down from the stands and suit up for a badly injured Aggie football team at the Dixie Classic in Dallas. There were 11 men playing on the field… he was the 12th.

That’s the Spirit of Aggieland. That’s the Spirit of the 12th Man. We keep fighting.

It took all of that spirit, and then some, to fight our way through the fall semester of the 2020-21 school year. Classes were conducted either all-online or in a hybrid format that included an in-person option. Some students returned to Bryan-College Station; others never left their respective homes. Lines at COVID testing kiosks around the A&M campus were extravagantly long, especially before weekends when students planned to return to visit family back home. It was never easy, but somehow, it worked out.

Much of the same could be said for the Texas A&M Athletics department, which had achieved a top-four finish with an Orange Bowl victory on the football field during the fall. By the time A&M Director of Athletics Ross Bjork had finished celebrating the victory on January 2, it had been 297 days since the first cancellations began at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020. There was still a long way to go, but the excitement generated following the completion of fall sports in Aggieland made all of that work seem worth it. 

That momentum carried over to the Hildebrand Equine Complex, where Aggie equestrian saw measures of success both in and out of the competition arena, highlighted by four victories on the year and a No. 5 seed in the NCEA Championship. Individually, Hayley Riddle stood out, garnering All-America laurels and earning recognition as the SEC Horsemanship Rider of the Year. As a program, head coach Tana McKay’s squad embodied the spirit of the term student-athlete, topping off a record-setting year for athlete grade-point averages in Aggieland by notching the highest team GPA at 3.508. As a department, Texas A&M Athletics had the greatest single academic year in the department’s annals, with the Equestrian program at the forefront of that historic level of achievement.

At the Student Rec Center Natatorium, both the men’s and women’s swimming & diving programs were getting started on impressive runs of their own. The women’s team posted a 5-1 record in dual meets, taking home the title in the annual Art Adamson Invite, finishing sixth at SEC Swimming Championships and 14th at NCAA Championships. Freshman Chloe Stepanek led the way in freestyle events and picked up multiple All-America honors, highlighting a bright future for head coach Steve Bultman and his squad. 

On the men’s side, head coach Jay Holmes’ squad had what was arguably one of the top postseason performances in program history. At NCAA Men’s Swimming & Diving Championships in Greensboro, North Carolina, the team finished in the top-10 for the first time since 2001 and earned recognition as the No. 7 program in the final CSCAA Coaches Poll of the year, but that’s not the whole story. 

One name that always comes to mind when you think of Aggie swimming, at least this year, is Shaine Casas. Casas took home not one, not two, but THREE individual National Championships – the first Aggie men’s swimmer to EVER win an individual title, much less a trio of them. Following his extraordinary outing, Casas was named SEC Swimmer of the Year, took home the SEC Men’s Swimming & Diving Commissioner’s Trophy and was crowned the CSCAA Men’s Swimmer of the Year. In addition, Casas was joined by Mark Theall, Kaloyan Bratanov and Clayton Bobo on the 800 free relay team that took home the gold at the SEC Championships and landed a historic third-place mark at NCAA’s. 

The program saw additional success on the diving board, as head coach Jay Lerew guided two of his athletes to SEC Championships, garnering SEC Women’s Diving Coach of the Year laurels in the process. Women’s diving star Charlye Campbell became A&M’s first female springboard SEC Champion, posting the highest score on the 3-meter and was joined on the podium by teammate Aimee Wilson, who took second. Meanwhile, on the men’s side, Kurtis Matthews defended his 3-meter springboard SEC title, also taking second on the 1-meter board. 

Texas A&M men’s golf had a strong year, winning two tournaments during the regular season, advancing to the SEC Championship semifinals and landing an NCAA Tournament berth. Following the team’s postseason success, Bjork elected to lift the interim tag off of Brian Kortan, officially making him the team’s head coach. Junior Sam Bennett earned first-team All-SEC honors with a dominant performance in 2021 that included a trio of tournament victories, a couple of SEC Golfer of the Week honors and recognition as the National Golfer of the Month for March by the Ben Hogan Award. Bennett went on to lead the United States delegation at the Arnold Palmer Cup in Illinois, guiding the U.S. squad to its first win since 2018 while earning the prestigious Michael Carter Award as the tournament’s most valuable player. 

The women’s side of the clubhouse saw senior leader Courtney Dow land a spot on the All-SEC Second Team. Dow finished in the top 20 at four tournaments and enjoyed top-10 finishes at two events. At season’s end, Bjork announced the hiring of Gerrod Chadwell from the University of Houston to guide Aggie women’s golf into a new era. Excitement for the team is already brewing, as Chadwell recently announced the transfer acquisitions of All-American Hailee Cooper and 2021 American Athletic Conference Freshman of the Year Zoe Slaughter. Both will look to bolster a strong roster headlined by Louisiana Women’s Amateur Champion in rising senior Brooke Tyree. 

We were fighting. Across the winter and spring, student-athletes, coaches and administrators pulled themselves up by the bootstraps and dominated the collegiate athletics landscape. With individual accomplishments pouring in from every direction and multiple programs setting new records, success in spite of the pandemic was beginning to feel like a constitutional right. 

Then the storms rolled in.

There are 254 counties in Texas. Now imagine all 254 of those counties, in a state designed for temperatures above 90 degrees, in a winter storm warning. Ice and snow overtook the entire Lone Star State in a freak blizzard that cost over $130 billion in direct and indirect economic losses. Practically everything was shut down, power was lost state-wide and dozens of Texans lost their lives. In a year already consumed by the nightmare of a global pandemic, individuals around Texas were forced to come face-to-face with yet another obstacle, how to grapple with a once-in-a-generation blizzard.

Texas A&M saw multiple events cancelled. Teams were unable to practice. Coaches and student-athletes were, in some cases, stranded out of the state. It was yet another challenge in a year where nobody could catch a break.

“You just have to expect the unexpected when you’re an athletics administrator,” Bjork mentioned. “The great thing, not that you ever want to deal with something like that, is that we actually had a plan in place for severe weather situations. I guess you could say that a silver lining to that whole situation is that we were already well-versed in how to work in a hybrid situation. It’s not like we had all 70,000 students on campus, or all of our staff for that matter. We were in a virtual world already, so we were prepared to adapt from that standpoint. The biggest part was that there was nothing we could do. We couldn’t just sweep the snow or melt the ice away. It lingered for several days. 

“Just in athletics alone, we had over $2 million in damage in all of our facilities. It wasn’t just Kyle Field. Each and every one of our facilities had some sort of issue that we had to remedy. That was an unexpected financial burden, but the good thing was that it only lasted a couple days, and we were able to keep people safe. We were able to help out in our community by establishing Reed Arena as a warming shelter. Whether we could help 500 or 5,000 people, we were going to help out in whatever ways we could. It was like, oh yeah, by the way, in the middle of dealing with matters of social injustice and a global pandemic, we have a once-in-a-lifetime winter storm.”

Although Aggie athletics saw significant damage to all of its facilities, the Maroon & White still managed to serve as a community resource during a time of need in the Brazos Valley. Repairs to all of the athletic and academic facilities were made quickly and efficiently, with dedicated A&M employees working around the clock to get the university campus back into working order. Everyone was able to safely return home, restart practices and resume their regular schedules. Following the Valentine’s week snowstorm, individuals across the Aggie network and around the country gained a new appreciation for the resiliency needed to fight through this trying period in our history. 

Toughness and resiliency were calling cards at Reed Arena for Aggie basketball this year, as Buzz Williams’ men’s basketball team lurched out to a 6-2 start to the season capped off by a thrilling 68-66 victory over Auburn at the start of the new year. Led by returning starters Andre Gordon, Jay Jay Chandler and Savion Flagg, the men’s basketball team was poised to embark upon another strong run through the SEC regular season schedule. Unfortunately, due to a combination positive COVID tests and lingering effects from the winter storm, the Aggies schedule included multiple postponements and cancellations that segmented the season. However, after a busy spring in the transfer portal coupled with an exciting crop of new recruits and returning players, the future of the Texas A&M men’s basketball team is extremely bright. 

On the other side of the Cox-McFerrin Center for Aggie Basketball, Gary Blair’s women’s team was preparing for a landmark year. This one was going to be special, particularly when you remember that the Aggies would be celebrating the 10th anniversary of the 2011 National Championship squad that gave way to a new generation of growth and parity in women’s college basketball. Behind N’dea Jones, Ciera Johnson, Aaliyah Wilson, Kayla Wells and Jordan Nixon, the Maroon & White finished 22-1 in the regular season, went undefeated at home, posted a 9-0 record against ranked teams and tied the program’s highest ranking in the history of the AP Poll at the No. 2 spot in March. It was fitting that all of those accomplishments would result in climbing a ladder to cut down the Reed Arena nets following an SEC Championship-clinching win over No. 5 South Carolina. The Aggies advanced to the SEC Tournament semifinal the next week, earning a No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament.

And that was only the beginning. 

Following a successful outing in the First Round, the team woke up on the morning of March 24 preparing to challenge the No. 7-seeded Iowa State Cyclones, led by deadeye shooter Ashley Joens. Through the first period, the Cyclones bombed 3-pointer after 3-pointer and held the Aggie offense back, as ISU led 22-12 heading into the second. Then A&M found its fight. Trailing by as many as nine points in the fourth quarter, the Maroon & White chiseled away at Iowa State’s advantage utilizing clutch plays from Wells and Nixon. The game, which Texas A&M had never led, was deadlocked at 75-75 at the end of the fourth quarter. We were going to overtime.

To that point, the New York City native, Nixon, had scored 28 points. She already had a legendary performance, but after all that she had been through; all that WE had been through, she wasn’t going to settle for anything short of immortality. She drilled a 3-pointer to open the overtime period, giving the Aggies a lead for the first time. She finished with 35 points and seven assists, including the final four points of regulation and seven of A&M’s nine points in OT. Is that not impressive enough for you? Well picture this: there are seven seconds left on the clock, game tied at 82-82. Iowa State’s Joens attempts a layup at the end of the shot clock, but it’s blocked from behind by Ciera Johnson right into Nixon’s hands. She takes a few dribbles, gathers and kisses a running layup off of the glass to send Texas A&M to the Sweet 16. 

Immortality achieved.

Although the Maroon & White would fall in the next round to the eventual national runner-up Arizona Wildcats, that roster of 15 inspirational individuals touched our hearts and minds like never before. 

“I think everyone knew that we would have a good team, but we had a lot of new pieces,” Bjork recalled. “Nobody knew what Jordan [Nixon] was going to do, she was a transfer and a newcomer. We knew she had a great pedigree, but we didn’t know exactly what to expect. But we had a nucleus of leadership with Ciera [Johnson], N’dea [Jones], Aaliyah [Wilson] and Kayla [Wells]. To me, we had people on that roster that had been there before and had done things at a high level. You knew you could rely on their leadership abilities to bring our newcomers along. 

“Then we just kept winning. I thought it was just a fantastic run, and an incredible job of coaching by Coach [Gary] Blair. He’s obviously a legend and one of the best of all-time. He maximized the team and we just happened to run into the hottest team in the country when we played Arizona in the Sweet 16. I will always remember the South Carolina game and that environment, cutting down the nets and winning an SEC Regular Season Championship.”

If that was the end of this story, it would have been pretty sweet. But ESPN2 elected to have interviews on the court following NCAA Tournament games with an impact player. Naturally, Holly Rowe and the producers picked Jordan Nixon after Texas A&M’s Second Round victory. To open the interview, Rowe asked, “When you got the ball in your hands with three seconds left, what were you thinking as you drove into the lane?”

Nixon jokingly replied, “Make a basket.” Then, withholding tears, she continued: “I say it all the time, and it really goes back to trust. They trust me. They trust me to make plays, they trust me to lead this team. Win, lose or draw, every single person on that bench is behind me, and it makes these moments that much more special.”

That portion of the speech made national news, warranted shoutouts from LeBron James and Gabrielle Union, and appeared the following morning on ABC’s Good Morning America. It was a tear-jerking reply to a very simple question. It reminded us why we all love college sports. Yes, it was nationally trending on Twitter, yes, it was the most discussed story on sports talk shows, yes, all those things are great. But there was one more exchange that will stick in every Aggies’ heart for the rest of their lives. 

Rowe continued, “You guys didn’t even lead in this ball game until the overtime period. How did you guys find this within your heart? Because this one was all heart tonight.” 

Nixon took a breath and responded.

“Spirit of the 12th Man, if you’re familiar. We keep fighting.”