When the Board of Trustees for Hendrix College in Conway voted to reinstate football in May 2008, board members probably had no idea how successful the program would be. They apparently made the right decision.
The 2017 season marks the fifth year that the Hendrix Warriors have played football since the program was shut down following the 1960 season. Prior to Saturday’s game at Sewanee, Tennessee, Hendrix had a record of 27-18 overall and 3-1 this season.
According to the history of Hendrix football on www.hendrix.edu, school president Marshall T. Steel announced at a convocation that Hendrix would discontinue football for the third time in school history. He said the decision was not a backward step, “but a progressive one which can perhaps lead to greater academic perfections.”
When Hendrix finally got a plan in place to restart the school’s football program, Justin “Buck” Buchanan was hired in April 2012, 13 months before the Warriors would return to the gridiron.
Buchanan came to Hendrix after serving as an assistant for 13 seasons at Louisiana
College in Pineville, Louisiana, where he was when the football program was started there, so he knew what it was going to take to build a team from scratch.
“I mowed the grass and called defense,” Buchanan said with a laugh.
After 13 years there, Buchanan wanted a chance to become a head coach, so he applied for the Hendrix position.
“I spent 13 years at Louisiana College, and it was time [to decide], ‘What am I going to do next?’” he said. “I wanted to be a head coach. I evaluated what I’d be good at. I went to a school like Hendrix (Austin College in Sherman, Texas). I wanted to be [a coach] at a college like where I played and I could relate to the guys. That was important.”
Buchanan was hired after Hendrix, which is a member of NCAA Division III, went through a national search for a head coach. Buchanan said Hendrix restarting football was a six- to eight-year process.
“There was a lot of thought and preplanning going into that,” he said. “That was very important to me when I started looking around at what I wanted to do.
“They had to pick me. I didn’t necessarily pick Conway. I had to interview. I’m glad that I had the opportunity to present myself and what I could share for the vision of the program.”
Buchanan said Hendrix reminded him of Austin, whose team the Warriors beat 36-24 on Sept. 23 in Conway.
“I really liked the people [at Hendrix] from the time I stepped on campus,” he said. “It reminded me of the type of school I went to, the type of people I was used to being around, what made it special for me playing football in college and going to a good school. That was all important.”
After taking the job in April 2012, Buchanan recruited for a year to get the pieces in place for that first season in 2013.
“We only had a couple of guys on campus that first fall,” Buchanan said. “We didn’t want to bring in guys without playing yet. Without playing, it makes for long days. When you’re a football player, you’re used to doing that every day. You want to go do it. It’s hard to sit around. We also wanted to make sure we got a good first class and concentrated on recruiting through that year, instead of practicing like some startup programs.”
The first season, Hendrix had only 52 players on its roster.
“But we tried to choose the right ones, the right fit for Hendrix,” Buchanan said. “You can be smart and be good at football.”
Buchanan’s first recruiting class had an average ACT score of 27.5.
“We had some really good players,” he said. “We had two of the best players in the country for the past four years in Seth Peters and Dayton Winn.
“The whole concept was to get the right ones to come here, and let’s get those coached up on what we want, what our expectations were, and don’t wait to get good at what we do.”
When Hendrix took the field for the first time in 53 years on Sept. 7, 2013, the Warriors did what few first-year teams do — win their first game.
Hendrix beat Westminster College of Missouri 46-44 at the new Young-Wise Stadium in Conway in front of more than 2,940 fans.
“You couldn’t have written a better movie script for what we did,” Buchanan said of his team’s first of three wins in 2013.
“We survived the first year,” he said. “If we hadn’t had some injuries, we could have had a winning season that year. We had a chance to be competitive right from the start.”
Hendrix went 3-7 in 2013, 6-4 in 2014, 8-3 in 2015 and 7-3 in 2016.
In 2015, only their third year back, the Warriors won the Southern Athletic Association Conference championship and advanced to the NCAA playoffs, where they lost to Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama, in the first round.
“We’re very pleased,” Buchanan said. “It’s a fine line between very pleased and happy and being complacent. You don’t want to be complacent.”
In 2016, Hendrix failed to make the playoffs for a second year, but the school did have a record-setting season. The Warriors became the first D3 school to average at least 600 yards per game in a season. Other teams to average more than 600 yards per game include D1 Houston in 1989, D1 Baylor in 2013 and 2015, D1 Mississippi Valley State in 1984 and D2 Hanover College of Indiana in 1948.
“Those are things we hang our hat on,” Buchanan said. “It’s an accomplishment, but I would have traded that record for three points.”
Last year, we had a great football team, and there are other great teams, too. We came up short in a couple of those games. We had three one-possession ballgames, and we had some turnovers in those games that cost us. That’s the way the ball bounces.”
Kody Smith of Lonoke, a senior on this year’s team, was part of the second recruiting class at Hendrix. He is proud of what the program has accomplished in such a short time under Buchanan.
“It’s truly unbelievable what Coach Buck and his staff have been able to do,” Smith said. “When I was recruited, they had a stadium and a nice locker room, but the first class, they didn’t have any of that [when they were recruited]. They just had it on paper. They didn’t have stands. They didn’t have a locker room. They didn’t have a weight room. They didn’t have anything. For that first class to take that leap of faith they did, that really paved the way for everyone.”
Buchanan said he has embraced the history of the Hendrix football program since the first day he came on campus.
“We want to embrace everything about our past,” he said. “The alums that are here have wanted football back for so long. They are an integral part of what we do.”
Each season during fall camp, the team hosts a day when alumni can eat with the football team. There is an Old Warriors luncheon in Little Rock once a month.
“It’s great to have those guys and see the pride on their faces,” Buchanan said. “There’s a lot of guys who didn’t get to finish their eligibility. Their chance to play and finish is out there with our guys every time we go out there.
“Having those guys involved is very crucial. Again, it’s about support, not just from them but from our administration. It’s nice to see that we don’t have empty stands on the weekends.”
Hendrix athletic director Amy Weaver said the football program under Buchanan’s leadership has done so much for the school.
“It’s been amazing for the college,” she said. “A lot of that has to do with Coach Buck and his staff bringing in the right kind of players and the players embracing the responsibility that they’ve had in coming in as we added football.
“It’s been a great experience.”
Hendrix has three home games left this season — Oct. 7 against Birmingham-Southern at 1 p.m.; Nov. 4 against Rhodes College at 6 p.m.; and Nov. 11 against Millsaps College at 1 p.m. Admission is free.
Staff writer Mark Buffalo can be reached at (501) 399-3676 or mbuffalo@arkansasonline.com.