Baylor

Callie Schrank loves her job and the way it's challenged her in the seven years since she started at Baylor in 2011 as the Director of Athletics' administrative assistant.

She is now part of Mack Rhoades' senior leadership team since being promoted to Associate AD and Athletics Chief of Staff last March.

At least partially because of the trials she went through in having children, however, being a mom to 5-year-old Cru and 5-month-old Haze is at the top of her priority list.

"Being a mom is so important. This is the responsibility God gave me," she said. "Who else is going to mother them? By God's grace, I have been given the privilege of raising two rambunctious boys, and what a joy it is. They have a dad and he is highly involved, but I get one shot. I already look at Cru and think, `Oh my gosh, he is such a sponge. He hears everything, he is watching everything.' And I want to make sure I'm present in his life."

A farm girl from Iowa who worked in the cornfields in the summer, Callie moved to Freeburg, Ill., with her family when she was 7 years old. In high school, she played volleyball and basketball and ran track for the Midgets. Yes, that was the school mascot.

"Football tried to go with Blue Rage for a while, because Midgets, really?" she said. "At the edge of town, there were these signs indicating you were entering Midget County."

While working on a Bachelor of Arts degree at Baylor (2004), Callie served as a counselor at the Kanakuk Christian camps in the summer and also did a two-month mission trip to Ghana.

"If you ask people times in their lives that were real life-changers, those life moments where you could look back on it and say that changed who I was or how I thought about something," she said, "so many times it's either camp, that spiritual high, or it's some mission trip kind of experience."

Continuing on that path, Callie worked for Purpose Driven Ministries in California for a semester before moving back to Texas to work for Joshua Expeditions out of Dallas and Sky Ranch in Van.

Eventually taking a full-time job with Sky Ranch, she served as high school girls director and missions coordinator for 2 ½ years, partnering with camps in Russia and France and starting one in Africa.

With the financial support of commercial real estate magnate Clyde Jackson, Callie helped start a one-month summer camp at the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro, "where the maasai children came, and it was an incredible experience."

In the offseason for camps, Callie would travel around the country to recruit hundreds of student workers. That's how she met her now-husband, Cody, who was working at one of the other camps.

The couple married in the summer of 2007 and worked in Seguin, Texas, before moving back to Waco four years later when Callie was supposed to start a master's program in sports management at Baylor.

"Two hours before I was supposed to start, I declined the program and accepted the job as (then-Director of Athletics Ian McCaw's) assistant," Callie said.

In a steady climb up the ladder, she was promoted to Director of Personnel & Administration in 2014 and Assistant AD for Personnel & Administration a year later.

"Once you get your foot in the door, work hard and you're a good steward of what you're given, make room for more and people are going to give you more," Callie said. "And there's always more to give. It's just a matter of if you can handle what you have."

With then-Deputy AD Todd Patulski tied up with the design, construction and operations at McLane Stadium, which opened in 2014, Callie took on more and more responsibility with personnel issues.

"Because I worked so closely with Todd, I think he was able to slowly give that to me," she said. "Anytime you work with personnel, it can be kind of intimidating, but Todd was a great mentor for me. He just made people feel at ease. He was very assertive, but not overwhelming or overly aggressive."

Outside of her normal duties at work, one of Callie's passions has been working with Senior Associate AD for Compliance Chad Jackson in leading Baylor's Feed My Starving Children project. In a five-year run, student-athletes, coaches and staff packed almost 600,000 meals for children around the world.

"I think it was an opportunity, even just for two hours, to help our athletes think outside themselves and expose them to some stories of children who don't have the basic things we have," she said. "To take on and package that many meals in six hours, and it was a well-oiled machine, I'm really thankful for the opportunity to be a part of that."

Since the day Rhoades took over as Vice President and Director of Athletics at Baylor in July 2016, he says, "Callie has been invaluable, such a big part of helping me get settled."

"What I realized is that she needed to do much more than just help me. Her value to this department was so much greater," he said. "She's got such an infectious personality, attitude, energy, and this insatiable appetite to learn and to grow and to get better. Anything you give her, she sinks her teeth into it and gets after it. What I appreciate is that if she has questions, she's not afraid to ask them."

Promoted to Athletics Chief of Staff 13 months ago, Callie is now part of Rhoades' senior staff and decision-making process.

In a roundtable discussion for ADU.com with fellow Athletic Chiefs of Staff from Duke, Penn State and Clemson, Schrank said she hopes her experience and longevity within the department have "been valuable in maintaining healthy relationships with our staff and campus partners in addition to providing institutional knowledge of processes and systems."

"Hopefully, I've established credibility with (Rhoades) and his executive team by providing a unique perspective, engaging in healthy authentic dialogue, following through on projects, maintaining collaborative relationships with colleagues and campus constituents and by truly caring for the ethos of our department."

One of the reasons why being a mom is so important to Callie is because it was so hard for her to become one. After a year and a half of trying to get pregnant, she was about to start taking fertilization medicine when she found out she was expecting her first child.

Four years later, "we went through tons of Clomid (fertilization pills), then did a mini-IVF, which is not a full-blown IVF process, and that's how we had Haze."

"He was our last embryo available," Callie said. "After that, I would have called it quits. It's a lot of shots, a lot of medication, a lot of drugs, and I was just done, emotionally. . . . God is so good. He is always so faithful in that."

While she still has "mom guilt" for dropping the boys off at daycare, Callie says Baylor's Piper Child Development Center has been a true Godsend.

"We pray for the teachers every night, the four people that help me raise my boys," she said. "It's been the biggest blessing in the last four years outside of having those kids, because they help me raise my kids when I have chosen to be a career mom, which can be rare in the athletics industry at this level."

Named after Cru Jones, a young BMX racer in the 1986 movie, "Rad," Cru practices riding his new bike every night with his dad, "either in our back yard doing jumps or out at the pump park (at Cameron Park). Cru is learning how to ride on berms and doing jumps, and he's 5," Callie said. "I've got some pretty sweet videos from last night. He's a little stud."

This summer, Cody and Cru are actually meeting Bill Allen, the actor who portrayed Cru Jones, and riding on a recreation of the Helltrack that was used in the movie.

"They take it pretty seriously," Callie said. "My husband is in heaven with it."

Haze is actually named after Cody's "wild, wild grandma, Hazel," who played a big role in raising him.

"We always wanted to have a Hazel if we had a little girl, but I didn't have a daughter in my cards," Callie said. "And I'm obviously not going to have any more kids, so we just dropped the `L `and made it Haze."

Cody, Assistant Director for Outdoor Adventure in Baylor's Campus Recreation department "always has adventures up his sleeve," Callie said. They go somewhere in the mountains at least once a year and are going with another couple to the slot canyons in Utah this summer.

One thing about Callie, Mack said, "is you always know when she's here, because you can hear her laugh literally from way down the hallway. And there is no mistaking that laugh."

"I'm not sure Callie has ever had a bad day."