The Hendrix College Warriors were down 44-43 to Westminster College with just one second left in the fourth quarter. The first game of the 2013 season would come down to a last-second field goal attempt, as freshman kicker Steve Crenshaw drove his right foot through the ball from the 15-yard line.

The ball sailed through the uprights and nearly 3,000 fans at Young-Wise Memorial Stadium saw what no person had seen since 1960 — a Hendrix football victory.

The Warriors program was revived in 2013 after a 53-year dormancy that began when the team was discontinued from Hendrix College in 1960. Since 2013, the Warriors program has transformed from the lowest-ranked Division III football squad to a trip to the playoffs in 2015.

“A lot of people expect new programs to not even fight for a win,” running back Dayton Winn said. “Our coaches said that we’re trying to win, and we were gonna do that from the start.”

In the 1940s, schools in Arkansas began giving players scholarships for tuition and even reportedly paid some players directly for their participation in athletics, according to “Hendrix College: A Centennial History” by James E. Lester Jr. By 1955, Hendrix had only 22 players on its roster as the university prioritized academics. And then in 1960, it was gone for good.

Then, in 2013, the school decided that football would bring more students to the school and make money, it said in a release.

Hendrix, located 35 miles north of Little Rock, Arkansas, hired Buck Buchanan to lead the program. It became Buchanan’s full-time job to revive a team left dormant for so long. He had helped restart the football program at Louisiana College in 1999 as an assistant coach, and it was time for him to do it again at Hendrix.

His first task was to recruit a team of just 52 players. Winn, a part of the initial 2013 recruiting class, said the small team made it a lot easier for the program to transition.

“It was really the student part first,” Buchanan said. “That’s what was most important to us, especially as the program was starting out. We wanted to build small and grow from there.”

With the transition came challenges for the small team, so in order to help build cohesiveness, the players would go over to quarterback Seth Peters’ house on Thursday nights, Winn said. Peters’ parents would cook the team dinner, and the players would sit around the house and watch Thursday Night Football.

“We would do activities like bowling, team bonding, go watch a movie, that kind of stuff,” Winn said. “That would definitely be the most memorable stuff off the field.”

The 2013 Hendrix team wasn’t initially well received by other Division III coaches — the Warriors were ranked dead last in the 2013 Division III poll. It was a ranking that Buchanan said the team didn’t necessarily deserve, but a ranking that made sense for the new program.

But with the poor ranking to its name and a roster half the size of most collegiate programs, Hendrix won its first game. Buchanan called it “the best moment” in the past four years.

“That was an unbelievable experience, so yeah, that’s the top,” Buchanan said.

In 2015, two years after posting a 3-7 record, the Warriors rose up again, blazing an 8-2 regular season record and winning the Southern Athletic Association title.

With the conference title, Hendrix received a bid to the Division III playoffs. It was the first time Hendrix was given a playoff invitation in school history, and even though the Warriors lost the opening game, Buchanan still said the postseason run “was very special” for his young Warriors squad.

As the program grew, the small recruiting class from 2013 grew as well. Winn went on to lead all of Division III with 2,732 all-purpose yards in 2015. He also led the country with 248.2 all-purpose yards per game. Peters earned first team all-SAA honors and threw for 2,811 yards, which ranked No. 16 in the country.

“(Winn and Peters) are two of the best players in Division III, and they automatically give us recognition,” Buchanan said. “They’re showing that Division III is real football, and that was crucial to get us started. That’s increasing (Hendrix’s) brand as a college.”

The Warriors roster that started with 52 players in 2013 now sits at 101 players, and the team that was once ranked last out of over 200 Division III teams at the beginning of the 2013 season is now ranked No. 32, receiving 29 votes in the D3football.com 2016 preseason poll.

“I’m looking at these guys (who started the program), and they’re not freshmen anymore,” Buchanan said. “I told them four years ago that they would look up one day and be seniors, and here we are. It’s hard to believe that all of this has happened so fast.”

Published on September 6, 2016 at 10:28 pm

Contact Matt: mjfel100@syr.edu