By Jerry Hill
Baylor Bear Insider
           
Kristen Hankins was adamant, almost defiant, about not following in her dad's footsteps and becoming a coach.
           
A communications, marketing and advertising major at Stephen F. Austin University, where she was part of the school's nationally ranked pom squad, Hankins took a sports marketing job out of college. At the same time, though, she was spending every spare minute at night and on the weekends teaching at dance studios and cheer gyms in the Houston area.
           
"I didn't realize at that point that God had a different plan for me. I just thought I was doing it for fun," said Hankins, now in her second year as Baylor's Director of Spirit & Traditions. "Eventually, my mom was like, 'What are you doing? You're killing yourself. What you really love to do is what you're not doing.'''
           
That's where her career path took a turn. An assistant coach at SFA while she was finishing her undergraduate work, Kristen returned to coaching as assistant at McLennan Community College in 2009-10 and helped the dance team win the national championship.
           
"We had so many people come from MCC and dance at SFA. That was a feeder for a long time," she said. "That tie had always been there. A couple years before that, I had taken their team to summer camp when one of (MCC director Sandy Hinton's) daughters got married. So coming in, it was an easy transition. And I learned so much from her and got to help coach the 2010 national champions."
           
From there, Hankins was the founding coordinator of the spirit teams and coach of the competitive cheer and dance programs at Wayland Baptist University in Plainview, Texas.
           
Dr. Greg Feris, WBU's director of athletics at the time, contacted Hinton for a possible candidate and was given a strong recommendation to hire Hankins. Starting the programs from scratch, "we still had to order all the uniforms . . . and there was a lot of trial and error because I was a young coach and I had never been a head coach at that point."
           
Instead of being intimidated or overwhelmed, "I'm one of those people that it only pushes me harder to be better," Kristen said.
           
And thankfully, she had a core group of mentors and advisors that included Hinton, SFA coach T.J. Maple and Joyce Pennington, president and CEO of the American Dance and Drill Team where Kristen has served as a teacher for the last 15 years.
           
"I had a lot of people I could lean on when I had questions or concerns or wondered about things," she said. "Anytime I had questions, I had several people I could call. I was never really on an island."
           
Taking a hodge-podge group from soccer, track, "two actual real dancers and one cheerleader," Hankins led the competitive cheer team to a top-10 finish at the national meet in her first year.
           
"We got better and better and placed higher and higher," she said. "It was such a growing experience for me as a coach. There are a lot of things I would totally do again and a lot of things I wouldn't."
           
In 2014, after earning her master's degree in coaching and athletic administration through Concordia University in Irvine, Calif., Kristen took on another start-up challenge. As the athletic director at Uplift Heights Prep in Dallas, she also coached volleyball, track and competitive cheer & dance.
           
"We had football, volleyball, basketball, track, cross country, soccer, and then I started competitive cheer & dance. Imagine that," she said. "The principal there was actually one of my best friends since kindergarten, and he knew that I wanted to make the transition to being an athletic director and knew that I had built the program at Wayland. He said, 'Hey, I have a challenge for you.' So yeah, I went in and built another program."
           
In her second year, she helped the school win a $25,000 contest in a "bounce back" program run by East Bay and New Balance. "I personally logged in hundreds of votes every day. I told my kids we were going to win it and we were going to get the (football and soccer) field fixed so we could play home games," she said.
           
"We were playing in Balch Springs most of the time on community fields. . . . A lot of our parents couldn't make it far enough to get to the games. So, I wanted them to be able to come see their kids play."
           
The next challenge and opportunity came last summer, when Hankins was hired to take over the cheer and dance teams and mascots at Baylor.
           
"It was hard, because I really loved my kids at Heights," she said. "But, I knew I wanted to be back on the collegiate level really bad. I did a lot of soul-searching and a lot of prayer. . . . My husband is from Waco. And when we got married, I told him the only way I would move to Waco is if the MCC or Baylor job came open. And both people had been there for so long, I was like, 'That's not going to happen.' And then, it did.
           
"To be at Baylor, because I had taught here and come to camp here and been around Baylor, it was a God thing, honestly."
           
Nearly two decades after she "fell in love with Baylor" on a summer camp trip with Mineola High School, she now teaches her teams in the same studio at Marrs McLean Gymnasium.
           
After having so many things on her plate at Heights Prep, her motto at Baylor has consistently been, "We should do more." That includes the largest cheer and dance teams in program history and the addition of the female Marigold mascot to go with Bruiser.
           
"I think with the women running the Baylor Line like they did this year, and then having Dr. (Linda) Livingstone as the first-ever female president, it was just a great time," Kristen said of adding Marigold. "People look for people and things they can identify with. There are people that identify with Bruiser, but there's this whole group that identifies with Marigold. She was quickly accepted into the Baylor family and people loved her. All these little girls are now like, 'I want to be Marigold.'''
           
The timing was also perfect because Deanna Spencer, a senior who was the first Marigold, is the daughter of the original Bruiser, Andrew Spencer. "It was like, if we were ever going to do it, we needed to do it now," Kristen said.
           
Jovan Overshown, Baylor's Associate AD for Branding and Engagement, said Hankins' "desire to lead an elite program is evident in everything that she does."
           
"When she accepted this job, she promised she would raise the bar. And she's proven she is capable of doing just that. She has a true heart for this program and these athletes."
           
At Mineola, Kristen was part of a graduating class of 84 in 2000 and "did everything" in the small school.


           
"I was in theater, student council president, yearbook editor, you name it," said Kristen, who also played volleyball, softball and basketball and ran hurdles for the track team.
           
But, there was always dance.
           
"I had taken dance since I was little at various dance studios," she said. "I just kind of tried it all. Ballet was never my favorite, but I always had to do it. I did all kinds of dance, pom, jazz, twirling, jazz-nastics. I did it all."
           
When Koni Riley returned to Mineola to start the Dance Dimensions studio, after winning multiple national championships at SFA, "that's when we really started getting better and we started really competing."
           
Following in Riley's footsteps, Kristen earned a scholarship at SFA and was part of two top-five and a top-10 team on the national level.
           
"I love dance, but I fell in love with dance when I was at SFA," she said. "I just knew it had to continue to be a part of what I did. . . . I remember walking on the finals mat in Daytona, Florida, competing with your team when you made it there, because it's unlike any other. It's just points in time where you just never forget that feeling."
           
Kristen and her husband, Elliott Hankins, a Midway High and Baylor grad, met through friends while she was working in Dallas and were married on June 11, 2016.
           
She says her first year at Baylor was "definitely a whirlwind," starting with a trip to Shanghai with the team just after she arrived. But with a year under her belt now, Kristen says she feels blessed to work with assistant coaches Jennie Farmer and Daniel Saenz and "as a staff, we're excited about the upcoming year and looking forward to building an even stronger program."