By Cole Tompkins | Photographer
Baylor University should name the new field house the Kim Mulkey Field House with the court being named the Scott Drew Court. These two coaches have pulled Baylor out of the mud and deserve to be immortalized in our basketball arena for it.
We’ll start with Coach Mulkey. Arriving at Baylor in 2000, Mulkey has brought the Lady Bears 12 Big 12 titles, three national championships and 19 NCAA tournament appearances. Of those 19 appearances, 10 of them have had the Lady Bears in the Elite Eight or higher. Mulkey has made the mention of the Lady Bears make opposing teams weak in the knees. Oh, and that first national title came just five years after her arrival in Waco.
Now, onto Coach Drew. Scott Drew inherited a Baylor Basketball program in 2003 that most coaches in the country wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole. Coming off the heels of a scandal involving the murder of one of Baylor’s players, NCAA recruiting and postseason sanctions limited Drew to only seven scholarship positions. With those seven scholarships, Scott Drew signed the No. 7 recruiting class in the nation.
Scott Drew and Kim Mulkey have turned Baylor from an absolute joke of a program (think Kansas football for reference) to an indisputable powerhouse that is on it’s way to becoming a perennial blue blood. Mulkey’s Lady Bears were snubbed of a Final Four birth after a no-call foul in the final seconds of their game against UConn, which many viewed as a matchup that should have been played out for the national title rather than for a ticket to the Final Four. Drew’s Bears punched their ticket to the Final Four in a comfortable win over Arkansas and will square off with Houston on Saturday to see if they can reserve their place in the last dance. The 2020-2021 Baylor Basketball programs (and the 2019-2020, had the season not been cut short) have been nothing but phenomenal, and I think the leaders of those programs deserve to be acknowledged for their work.
Many of the buildings on Baylor’s campus have been named after the largest donor to its construction. A few exceptions to this I can think of are the Bill Daniel Student Union Building or a building like the Baylor Sciences Building which is named for no one. I think it would be a refreshing change of pace to see the new fieldhouse named in honor of the two coaches rather than the highest bidder. It would be especially refreshing for the Baylor Community to name the building and court after them while we still get to see the duo in action.
President Livingstone, Baylor Regents, Faculty, Students and Alumni:
Let’s raise our voices and name the new field house after the two people that established Baylor as a basketball school and cemented Baylor’s name on the top of NCAA brackets for years to come. Scott Drew and Kim Mulkey have given their all to this great school, now let us show them what they mean to us.
Sic ‘em forever.
