Hey Shaggheads! Are you a diehard fan of one college football team? I once was. This post will explain how I went from being an Oklahoma State Cowboy fan to a Sooner and a Razorback supporter. This is the story of why my wife Denise and I have been attending college football games pretty much every weekend for three years now.
Growing up, I was an Oklahoma State football fan. In Oklahoma, football is pretty big at the high school and the college levels due to the fact that Oklahoma has never had a professional football team. Many people in the state consider the Oklahoma Sooners in Norman equivalent to a professional team because of their national championships, Heisman winners and reputation. The underdog and smaller university in the state is Oklahoma State located in Stillwater.
Norman is just on the outskirts of Oklahoma City, so it’s in more of a metropolitan area, whereas Stillwater is a much smaller sized town out in the middle of nowhere. OSU is the closest university to Enid, so many of the Enid High school graduates attend college there. It’s a great place to go if you want to have immediate friends and a local roommate.
I went to junior college in Tonkawa, Oklahoma for two years but eventually end up at Oklahoma State for a year. I grew up more of an Oklahoma State fan than an Oklahoma fan and we would go to Stillwater more often to party. I wasn’t a huge college football fan at the time but followed Oklahoma State because it was close. At Oklahoma State I did a work study program where I got a job at the university, and it happened to be working at the football stadium.
I was at OSU when Jimmy Johnson was the coach. Oklahoma State never beat Oklahoma in the 80s although it is one of the oldest and most well known rivalries called Bedlam. The series is a very lopsided rivalry with OU winning the majority of games. And that gives a “Cinderella story” feel to the Oklahoma State fans. Okies pretty much grew up either Oklahoma State fans or Oklahoma fans. And if you were a fan of one team, you pretty much disliked the other team. That being said, I never rooted for OU even when they were playing a different team. As an OSU fan you didn’t want them to win another national title and have something else to brag about.
When I graduated from college I continued to be an Oklahoma State fan. I moved around the state a little bit but ended up back in Enid where I got married. The interesting thing is that my wife went to OU and grew up a Sooner fan. We were known as a house divided when it came to college football. She would root for OU and I would root for OSU for the first 20 plus years of our marriage.
We eventually had two daughters, Piper and Chaney, born 17 months apart. From a very early age my wife had our daughters in competitive dance. Lucky for us, they both loved to competitive dance and we never had to worry about other sports or being split during competitions. They were always in the same dance groups at the same dance studio. Their love of dance led them to be on the high school pom team.
As the girls were growing up we would take them to Oklahoma State in Stillwater because of the largest homecoming celebration in college. OSU has an event called the Walk Around, which the night before the homecoming game. All of the fraternities and sororities create huge displays and have a competition to see who can create the best display. They estimate that 30,000 people or more will all get together and circle the fraternities and sororities looking at all of the displays. The girls enjoyed the trips to OSU.
If you had asked me at the time, I would have told you that Piper was probably going to go to OSU and Chaney was probably going to go to OU. The fact that Piper enjoyed OSU was grounds for Chaney to obviously like OU a bit more. But as they got towards the end of high school they began looking into collegiate pom a little more and decided they wanted to pom for D1 football teams. On top of pomming for the major sports, some college pom teams compete and go to Disney World for Nationals against other pom teams. Come to find out, Oklahoma State is not a competitive pom team.
The University of Oklahoma has a competitive pom team and my wife went to school there. That combo plus the fact that they were in state made OU at the top of the list for Piper. It was the only school that she toured. She really liked the college and tried out for the OU Pom Team. We felt pretty fortunate that she made the team. So Piper enrolled and became a Sooner. Unfortunately 2020 was a weird year because of COVID and all collegiate sports were limited. The sports crowds were smaller, fans had to social distance and most places you had to wear a mask.
Piper’s first season was a pain. The girls could not pom on the field. They had to wear masks while they were performing and they had to stand at the end of the end zone on a wall. It was a big mess and never really felt like a normal season. During the year some college games were canceled, some players were not allowed to play and attendance was limited. Because of that I did not get the whole Sooner football experience. I spent that year still pulling for my OSU Cowboys.
The next year Chaney was going to graduate and was trying to decide where to go to college. She did not want to go to Oklahoma State because too many Enid classmates were going there and she wanted to experience something new and fresh. She actually wanted to get out of the state to do something on her own. She also did not want to go to OU and again follow in her sister’s footsteps. So Chaney started looking at SEC schools and was interested in LSU because they had a really great pom team. We basically told her she was not going that far out of state.
Chaney researched many pom teams through their social media accounts and started looking at the University of Arkansas. I had never even considered our girls going to Arkansas because we knew zero about the college and their sports teams. Chaney discovered that UofA had a pretty good pom team and not only did they pom for football and basketball, but they also performed for baseball which is one of her favorite sports. Another plus was that Arkansas has a darn good baseball team and really fun baseball pom outfits.
After doing a little research we saw that Fayetteville was barely over the Oklahoma border and they offer almost in-state tuition for Oklahoma residents. It’s only a 3.5 hour drive from Enid to the campus so everything seemed feasible. But Chaney had to make the team for any of that to happen so she signed up for tryouts which required her to send in some performance videos. A select group of girls were then invited to tryout in person in Fayetteville.
Without knowing anything about Arkansas we drove Chaney over to the college one weekend so she could perform for the Arkansas Pom Team, She set everything up all on her own and went in all by herself without having any connections. She ended up making the Razorback Pom Team which meant we had two daughters on D1 college squads. A weekend or two later we had to take Chaney back to Arkansas to get her a tour of the school. We hadn’t even toured the school at that point.
The fall of 2021 was our first year of college sports with the girls at two different schools. We studied both football schedules and discovered there were only two weekends out of the whole season that neither team had a home game. We looked at who the opponents were for both teams and also had to consider what was going on with sorority life at each school. If there was an important sorority function going on, we needed to be on that campus for the weekend.
The schedule of games that we came up with put us on each campus every other weekend. The first weekend we were at OU, the next weekend we were in Arkansas and then it went back and forth. There was a time or two when we were at Arkansas two weekends in a row, but then we were at OU two weekends in a row. We would usually leave Enid on Friday and either head to Norman or Fayetteville. We quickly fell in love with Fayetteville and have enjoyed staying there.
Back in the day when Denise and I first got married she would support OU and I would support OSU. There was one year when both schools had their spring games on the same day. We had decided to drive to Norman to watch the OU spring practice which was earlier in the day. I noticed that the OSU spring practice was later in the day so I suggested we go to both. And that’s what we did! We drove from Enid to Norman, then to Stillwater and ended up back in Enid. We thought that was a fun adventure.
Fast forward to the 2021 season and there was a Saturday where Arkansas played at 11:00am and OU played at 6:00pm. We were up for another adventure so we went to the Arkansas game in the morning and left with about 5 minutes left in the game. We raced across campus and hopped in our car and beat the traffic out of Fayetteville. It’s only 3.5 hours to Norman so we cruised to OU hitting a few back roads along the way. We pulled into town and saw a guy selling parking spots in his front yard. We were only four or five blocks from the stadium so we booked it to campus and made it into the stadium just before kickoff! Two D1 college football games in one day and we got to see both girls pom.
We’ve become Arkansas Razorback fans. We enjoy the tailgating, attending the Hog Walk and calling the hogs. We quickly fell in love with the players, the coach, the stadium, the town, the restaurants and the atmosphere. I’ve also become a Sooner fan which is a little weird. I see lots of potential for the OU football team and think they could win a national title sometime soon. Unfortunately I’m not seeing that with my OSU Cowboys. It will be interesting when Bedlam goes away and the two Oklahoma teams are in different conferences. At that point they’ll both be able to compete for conference and national titles without screwing up each others season with a loss.
There is an interesting tie-in between Arkansas, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and Enid. Back in the 60s when Arkansas was really good there was a tight knit group of players and assistants that were part of the football program. Some of those guys were Barry Switzer, Jerry Jones, Jimmy Johnson, Pat Jones and a player named Billy Gilbow. Switzer and Gilbow were roommates at Arkansas. Switzer ended up coaching at Oklahoma. Johnson and Jones went on to coach at Oklahoma State. Gilbow needed a job outside of football so Switzer talked him into moving to Enid, Oklahoma to work in the 70s. They moved to our neighborhood where I met his son Jason and we’ve been good friends ever since!
A big bonus to being an Arkansas Razorback fan and Oklahoma Sooners fan is that both have red as their school color. That allows us to buy red clothing without logos and wear them to either campus. Denise had special pullovers made with Razorback/Sooner divided on them. We got to wear them at the Oklahoma/Arkansas basketball game in Tulsa in 2022. That will most likely be the only time our girls will actually get to pom against each other.
This post was originally recorded as a podcast after our first season of split football in 2021. I have since updated the story as a blog post after our 2022 season of driving back and forth. Our second season turned out just as good as the first if not a little better. We met several great couples in Fayetteville while out having drinks and spent some time with Eric Gray, father of the OU running back, while in Norman.
At this point we only have one season left of splitting time between the two teams to watch our girls pom. Although Piper will be have graduated by Chaney’s last season I’m sure Denise will want to continue to make it to as many Sooner games as she can. After Chaney graduates I have a feeling we’ll try to make a random Razorback game from time to time but won’t be spending much time in Fayetteville. When will we make an OSU game in Stillwater? That’s a question I cannot answer.
Hope you enjoyed our interesting family story. It’s been fun. There’s not a whole lot of parents that have girls on two different DI pom teams at the same time. I think it’s keeping us young. Woo Pig Sooner!
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