On the third weekend of September, fans will fill Emil S. Liston Stadium, home of the Baker University Wildcats, for the first home football game of the season. Baker University is a small school — around 1,000 students — in a small town outside Lawrence, Kan. The team plays in the NAIA, a step below NCAA Division III. The Wildcats will face the Lindenwood University Lions, seeking redemption after a 50-19 loss last year.
When the team takes the field, six Wildcat players will hail from Pinellas County, Fla. — five from St. Petersburg and one from Largo. There are 95 players on the team. This will be the third season Pinellas County has sent players to Baker.
The recruiting pipeline started with a phone call, but it wasn’t a coach who called. Nor was it a player’s father. It was a fan named Robert Kinder.
Kinder’s connection with football traces back to 1948. He was 14 years old when he stood on the sidelines and saw the University of Missouri upset Southern Methodist University. The next season he worked the scoreboard for Missouri and endured the bad weather. In high school, Kinder played on a football team that won the state championship. He also played in the Army.
In 1988, Kinder was a banker when he met Charlie Richards, head football coach at Baker. It was the first day of football practice, and Kinder’s daughter was a freshman athletic trainer. The coach and the fan became friends. Richards helped Kinder grow his passion for football and encouraged him to coach a high school team for a year. Eventually, Kinder worked with the team during preseason and at coaching camps.
The Wildcats finished the 1994 season, and Richards sat in his office preparing for next year. Richards suffered a fatal heart attack around midnight. Kinder did not know the new coaching staff and again became a spectator.
In 2001, tragedy hit a mobile home park that Kinder owned in Hutchinson, Kan. A local company had a natural gas leak, which caused an explosion that killed two people in the park. The same year, Kinder’s mother-in-law’s health began to fail. She lived in Florida.
“You can look at a disaster as a disaster,” Kinder says. “Or you can look at it as an opportunity.”
Kinder and his wife moved to Pinellas County that November, as the football season came to a close. The Kinders went to games every weekend and sometimes watched multiple games in a day. In 2002, Kinder phoned the defensive coach under Richards. Kinder told him to come down to Florida and look at some players. The defensive coach recruited three players, but they did not meet Baker’s academic requirements.
Kinder continued to attend games and scout talent.
“I look at the game differently than 99 percent of people,” Kinder says. “Most people sit on the 50-yard line. I sit in the end zone.”
Kinder did not get paid for his efforts.
“I don’t need their money,” he says. “I just like to see good football.”
He did not offer scholarships to athletes but sent Baker info on players with potential. He says he looked for players with speed or size. Kinder also learned about students’ lives off the field, in the classroom and at home.
In 2004, Mike Grossner was named head coach at Baker. Kinder called Grossner and invited him to St. Petersburg. Grossner arrived two years later. The two men attended the Pinellas County All-Star football game for high school seniors and several of the schools’ practices.
Grossner met Alvin Davis, Gibbs High School head coach, during the recruiting trip. Davis coached high school for 34 years, including the last 17 years at Gibbs. He says that during his time there, about 10 athletes per year earned scholarships.
While Grossner was looking for players, Gibbs senior Alphaeus Williams was looking for a school. Williams was a part of the Business, Economic, Technology Academy, an honors program at Gibbs. He also played football.
But Williams was undecided about college. He went to Davis’ office to discuss where he wanted to attend school. Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University and Florida Atlantic University had recruited Williams heavily. But he wanted to leave the state.
“I told him anywhere,” Williams says. “I would be the first to go to a university out of state.”
Davis pulled a stack of college football coach cards from a drawer, including Grossner’s.
“I never heard of Baker in my life,” Williams says.
He visited the school and accepted a scholarship offer in 2006. Williams says he had successful freshman year and even felt like he was famous on campus. But he missed home and traveled back to Florida seven times that year.
Baker finished the 2006 season with four wins and six losses. The next spring, Grossner made his yearly preparations to recruit. He asked Williams for names of talented players from St. Petersburg.
Williams says he felt honored.
“I got half my team from Gibbs up here.”
Eight players from Pinellas County were offered scholarships, and five enrolled, including three from Gibbs.
“Once you get one, you can usually get a few more from that school,” Grossner says.
At the first team meeting in the fall, Williams saw familiar faces.
“It felt really good to see somebody from St. Pete,” he says.
He saw Adam Rodgers first. Others included Robert Woodall and David Malone, both from Gibbs; Colton Miller, of Largo; and Jaron McCree, from Boca Ciega. Grossner says Miller was the best defensive back in the conference during his freshman season.
None of the 2007 signing class had heard of Baker before they were recruited.
Woodall committed to Baker first among the players from Gibbs. He focused on earning an academic scholarship to a state school until Grossner called him in December 2006. He traveled to Baldwin City, Kan., with Rodgers, his freshman-year roommate.
Rodgers says he remembers exactly where the coach from Charleston Southern University sat in his parents’ living room a year ago. He was on the loveseat. Armed with a laptop, he tried to woo Rodgers with a final sales pitch. Rodgers had two other offers: Baker and Assumption College in Massachusetts. Rodgers says Baker just felt right.
McCree says Grossner talks straight with his players.
“He tells you everything you need to hear and everything you don’t want to,” McCree says.
McCree says he had good grades in high school but fell short of Baker’s academic standards. Grossner told McCree to attend Neosho County Community College in Kansas before coming to Baker. McCree started at the university in the spring of 2008 and quickly involved himself in student life. Woodall and McCree were initiated into Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity and have made plans to charter a chapter on campus.
Bob Kinder plans to continue to watch games from the end zone in search of Baker’s next recruits. Coach Alvin Davis retired from Gibbs last year, but the pipeline remains intact. Grossner recruited Matthew Cabassa, Pat Hanley and Edwin Mercedes to play at Baker in the fall. Grossner says he’s still looking for players and takes input from anybody.
“Some of my best players have come from people reaching out to me,” he says. “I didn’t find them.”