 "Photo: Walter Rosado")
Photo albums and scrapbooks of women's basketball teams from the 1960s, along with stat sheets for players so old they are applying for Social Security, are featured in the sports-archive section of Texas Tech's Southwest Collections Library.
Daniel Sanchez, an oral historian at the Southwest Collections Library, said Tech is in the process of becoming one of the premier sites in the nation for sports history.
In the summer, the library will host the annual meeting of the National Association of Sports Historians as well as the Collegiate Baseball Hall of Fame induction ceremonies.
Currently, the library is displaying an exhibit dedicated to women in sports.
"Our goal is to become the sports archive in the nation that everyone looks to," Sanchez said. "We have quite a bit of material right now, and it's growing every day."
In 1996, the library became the depository for records for the Southwest Conference, which is the conference Tech was a part of before the inception of the Big 12 Conference in 1996.
"We've interviewed a lot of people to fill in the gaps with the Southwest Conference records," Sanchez said.
Interviewing has become a major resource for the collection, Sanchez said. He has interviewed many historians, coaches and players from long-forgotten teams, and he said it's interesting to hear what they have to say.
"It's great talking to people who've made sports history," he said.
The library holds records from not only the Southwest Conference, but also records from many other sports. Sanchez said many coaches tell him there is no one else who wants the records, so it's a relief the library has become so involved in sports history.
"You get great insights talking to these people," he said. "We try to not only interview players and coaches, but also sports writers and sports historians."
The Collegiate Baseball Hall of Fame does not have it's own building; yet, the archive of records for college baseball will remain at Tech even after the organization gets its own building.
We started local, but with the Collegiate Baseball Hall of Fame, we've gone national," he said.
With the vast amounts of sports history stored at the library, someone might believe there is an endless flow of students wanting to see the collections.
Sanchez said that is not the case because many students look at the building and do not know exactly what it holds. The Southwest Collections Library is situated on the north side of the main library on the Tech campus.
"We're trying to get the word out that we're an archive," he said, "but we feature sports history and a lot of current things."
Sanchez said the archive caters to almost anyone's sports fetish, considering how much information is stored in the building.
Bill Tydeman, co-director of the Southwest Collections Library, laughed at the notion the library has heaps of sports artifacts simply laying around, but he said that might be a decent way of describing it.
"When we acquire something, we organize it, describe it and then put it online to make it available for research," he said. "Things aren't just 'laying' around."
Tydeman said the library is well on its way to becoming a premier site in the nation for sports records.
"Things have gone remarkably well," he said. "We've had terrific support from the Collegiate Baseball Association and coaches."
Chris Snead, associate vice president for Tech alumni, said the archive has been a great resource for the Alumni Association.
"They've been terrific for us," he said. "We've been excited about how professional they've been."
Bill Tynan, an oral historian, narrows his concentration at the library to the Wayland Queens basketball team as well as regional sports.
"We're starting to collect a lot of sports memorabilia," he said. "We're collecting more and more signed footballs and starting to collect more signed basketballs from champion teams."
Tynan said students who enroll in sports history courses would help the library by documenting the history of six-man sports high schools in the region.
six-man schools include a six-man football team, a men and women's basketball team and occasionally a track-and-field team, Sanchez said.
"They're typically very small schools," Tynan said.
The Women in Sports exhibit will be on display through June at the Southwest Collections Library.
Be the first to comment on this article!