Wayland Baptist University

Wayland Baptist University

Motto	Go Ye into All the World / Let There Be Light
Type	private, coeducational
Established	1908
Endowment	$51 million
President	Dr. Paul Woodson Armes
Location	Plainview , Texas , USA
Campus	suburban:
Nickname	Pioneers
Affiliations	Southern Baptist
Website	www.wbu.edu

Wayland Baptist University is private, coeducational Baptist university based in Plainview, Texas, U.S.A. Wayland Baptist has a total of fourteen campuses in four additional Texas cities, five other states, and the country of Kenya. On August 31, 1908, the university was chartered by the state of Texas, under the name Wayland Literary and Technical Institute. The university would have another name change in 1910 as Wayland Baptist College. In 1981, it attained university status and settled with the current name, Wayland Baptist University. It currently has an enrollment of approximately 1,200.

History

In 1906, the Staked Plains Baptist Association purposed the creation of a school. Dr. and Mrs. James Henry Wayland offered $10,000 and 25 acres (100,000 m²) of land in Plainview if the Staked Plains Baptist Association and the citizens of the city would raise an additional $40,000. In 1910, the school offered its first classes despite the administration building not yet being fully built. A total of 225 students were taking classes in primary education through junior college levels during the school's first term. After a public school system was well established in Plainview, the elementary grades were discontinued. Wayland Baptist gained membership to the American Association of Junior Colleges in 1926 and would later be approved as a senior college by the Texas Department of Education and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. The university is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools and the Texas Education Agency for teacher education training.

The school is the oldest institution of higher education in continuous existence on the High Plains of Texas due to the leadership of Dr. George W. McDonald, the fifth president of the school. When a run on the banks during the Great Depression threatened to close the school, the administration and faculty agreed to forgo pay in order to continue the task of educating students, trusting God to supply their needs.

In 1951, a black teacher approached the college asking if she could fulfill continuing education requirements at the college. Dr. James W. "Bill" Marshall, the school's sixth president, led the college to take the historic step to admit black students to the college, making Wayland the first four-year liberal arts college in the former Confederate states to voluntarily integrate. This action came three years before the Supreme Court's decision to ban school segregation, Brown v. Board of Education.

The Malouf Abraham Family Arts Center on the Wayland campus was endowed by the family of the late State Representative Malouf Abraham, Sr., and his son, Malouf Abraham, Jr., a retired allergist and active art collector from Canadian, the seat of Hemphill County in the northeastern Texas Panhandle.

A musical scholarship has been established at Wayland in honor of Sybil Leonard Armes, a Christian writer and alternate poet laureate of Texas in 1969, who was the mother of Wayland President Paul Woodson Armes.

In May 2008, entertainer Jimmy Dean, a Plainview native, announced that he is making the largest ever gift to Wayland.

Athletics

Wayland's women's basketball program has the distinction of being the only women's team to win 1,300 games. The mascot for the women's team is the Flying Queens. The original team name was the Wayland Lassies, but in 1948, a local company, Harvest Queen Mill provided uniforms for the team, so they became the Harvest Queens. Before the 1950 season began, the team had a chance to play a game in Mexico city. A Wayland grad, Claude Hutcherson, was persuaded to fly the team to Mexico. Hutcherson became enamored with the team, and became a major sponsor, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on the team. When Hutcherson Air Service became a full sponsor of the team, they began calling the team the Hutcherson Flying Queens. Hutcherson provided three sets of uniforms, plus traveling attire, and flew the team about nine thousand miles a year to games. To this day, Hutcherson Air Service continues to provide travel for the women's road games.

Ironically, the strong support of Claude Hutcherson created problems for the school. Wayland considered dropping the team because the scholarships threatened their accreditation. In 1961, the Wayland board of trustees voted unanimously to eliminate women's basketball. The school had difficulty funding the academic programs. The accrediting organization, the Southern Association of Colleges, wasn't interested in AAU championships. Interestingly, there were no plans to eliminate the men's scholarships, only the women's scholarships. The local citizens did not accept the decision. Local businessmen, under the leadership of Claude Hutcherson, raised money to privately fund scholarships for a year. The trustees voted to reverse their position.

The team was coached by Harley Redin. Redin served in the Marine Air Corp in WWII, logging 50 combat missions over the South Pacific. After the war, he became the athletic director of Wayland Baptist, and the coach of the men's basketball team. The men's teams were very successful, making the NAIA post-season tournament three separate years. However, he became the coach of the women's team in 1955, and was even more successful—in 1954 they began a winning streak that would stretch to 131 games, including four consecutive AAU national championships. The winning streak would eclipse a prior winning streak of 102 games, held by Hanes Hosiery, which ended in 1954. For eighteen years under the coaching leadership of Redin, the team would win 431 games against only 66 losses. The team won six national AAU championships, and finished second six other times. Redin would go on to coach the USA Women's Pan American Team in 1959 and 1971. He was inducted into the inaugural class of the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame in 1999.

On April 1, 2010, Wayland Baptist announced their intentions of bringing back the football program and join the Central States Football League in 2012.

Notable alumni

• Matt Brown, a Wayland alumnus, is a football and track and field coach at Idalou High School, who is a gold and bronze winner in the Parapan American Games. He lost his left leg, amputated above the knee, as a result of an industrial accident in December 2005.

• W. Winfred Moore, leader of Texas Southern Baptists from Amarillo, received honorary degree from Wayland.

• Marsha Sharp, former coach of the Texas Tech Red Raiders women's basketball team, graduated in 1974 from Wayland.

References

• Festle, Mary Jo (1996). Playing nice: politics and apologies in women's sports. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-10162-7.
• Susan Shackelford; Grundy, Pamela (2005). Shattering the Glass: The Dazzling History of Women's Basketball from the Turn of the Century to the Present. New York: New Press. ISBN 1-56584-822-5.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Ikard (2005). Just for Fun: The Story of AAU Women's Basketball. The University of Arkansas Press. ISBN 978-1557288899. {{cite book}}: Text "first[Robert W." ignored (help)
• Porter, David (2005). Basketball: a biographical dictionary. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-30952-3.
• Su, Mila Chin Ying (May 2002). "Collegiate Women's Sports And A Guide To Collecting And Identifying Archival Materials" (PDF). Pennsylvania State University. Retrieved 2009-11-07.

External links

• Wayland Baptist University, Plainview, TX, main campus website