Lubbock group's College Baseball Hall of Fame dream coming to fruition elsewhere | Williams
Nearly 20 years after a small group of young Lubbock guys conceived the idea of honoring and preserving the history of a sport, there's finally some resolution to the story of the National College Baseball Hall of Fame. This week, the College Baseball Foundation and Visit Overland Park announced that Overland Park, Kansas, would provide the bricks and mortar needed to house the museum.
The Kansas City suburb pulled off in about 14 months what Lubbock couldn't get done in a decade or more of trying.
The National College Baseball Hall of Fame will be housed in The Museum at Prairiefire, the kind of fancy setting such an endeavor deserves.
"There's a certain aspect of ... still sort of wish it would've happened here," said Mike Gustafson, a founder and longtime head of the College Baseball Foundation. "But we'd really had almost seven years to set our sights forward and look ahead. The fact that this day happened and this announcement's been made, that it's got a home, we're as excited as we can be."
Speaking for himself and fellow Lubbock resident and College Baseball Foundation board member Chris Snead, Gustafson said, "I think both of us are super excited that the hare-brained idea we had back in 2005 looks like it's going to come to fruition. A little bit longer than we thought it would take, but still excited."
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The Lubbock group established the College Baseball Foundation in 2004, the National College Baseball Hall of Fame in 2005 and inducted the first class in 2006. Over the next 11 years, they inducted Hall of Fame classes annually, bringing a lot of famous players to the Hub City, and started awards to recognize the current season's stars. The Night of Champions was a first-class event.
They had everything except a physical shrine for fans to go visit. They had a groundbreaking in 2015, but no building ever went up.
Finally, in 2017, they ceased aspirations to put the museum in Lubbock, unable to secure the necessary funding or build an adjacent stadium designed to host tournaments and provide a revenue stream. It was going to go on three acres north of the Memorial Civic Center, where Lubbock now has the Buddy Holly Hall of Performing Arts and Sciences that opened three years ago.
In Overland Park, community and political leaders got behind it, Patrick Mahomes II kicked in a gift and, presto.
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"I think the people in Overland Park have been very aggressive in recruiting the Hall of Fame," Gustafson said, "in terms of introductions to corporations and those type things. They immediately engaged the lieutenant governor in the state of Kansas, as well as the mayor and people like that. They just handled the business side of it in a way that immediately connected dots within the first year.
"They're the ones that made the contact on the Patrick Mahomes gift, which is very real. I think one of their key talking points was the fact that Texas Tech people were at the core of this, and this operated out of Lubbock."
The fact the College Baseball Hall of Fame will end up in Overland Park's not necessarily an indictment of Lubbock for not earmarking a chunk of money; being fiscally responsible is city leaders' first duty. Nor is it an indictment of a group of guys who took a grand ambition and carried it farther than anyone could have imagined.
On a worthy project, they got the ball rolling and now someone else has picked it up. It's going to get across the finish line, and they can take pride in being founders.
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Lubbock baseball group's Hall of Fame dream coming to fruition elsewhere
