Whether it’s an organized group of Waco school-children, a relative’s neighbor or a family in need, there’s a good chance that Travis ‘T-Rex’ Carver has supplied them with a ticket to a Baylor sporting event at some point.
Across the last three years, Carver has distributed well over 3,000 tickets to a wide variety of people on various platforms, including SicEm365, Twitter/X, Facebook and text messages.
His passion project started in early 2022 when Carver was pursuing his MBA at Baylor’s Hankamer School of Business. Originally, Carver started accepting men’s basketball tickets from season ticket holders who could not attend a particular game and would re-distribute them to students who were unable to secure tickets.
Eventually, the process morphed into Carver switching his focus to redistributing tickets to members of the Waco community, who typically don’t attend Baylor sporting events. If a student still needs a ticket, however, Carver is more than willing to lend a helping hand.
“I’m not really targeting students, but I will provide them if a student reaches out to me and they need a ticket; I’m happy to help,” Carver said in an interview with SicEm365. “But it’s changed from trying to get more students into the arena to making new fans. I see it as an opportunity to create new fans in the Waco community. In my opinion, those people are right there to become fans and should be the easiest ones to convert.”
Carver, who grew up in Waco and attended La Vega High School, feels passionately about bridging the gap between the local community and Baylor. His mom graduated from Baylor, and while his father didn’t go to Baylor, he was a Bears super-fan who passed his dedication and fandom onto his son.
“I grew up in a non-traditional Baylor family,” Carver said. “Growing up, I always knew that a disconnect existed between Waco and Baylor, and I want to see that go away. McLane Stadium's location has helped, and Foster [Pavilion’s] location was designed to help that, but I want to see more Waco people become Baylor fans.”
Carver continued, “If you go to any other town with a big college, that whole town is fans of the college. If you go to College Station, they're all [Texas] A&M fans. I want people to come to Waco, where every business has a Baylor flag or something, and all the locals are Baylor fans, even if they don’t go there.”
After graduating from La Vega High School, Carver obtained his bachelor’s degree while playing football at McMurry University in Abilene, a three-hour drive northwest of Waco. Regardless of his other collegiate affiliations, Carver bled green and gold as a super-fan until the spring of 2023, when he officially obtained his MBA from Baylor and became an alumnus.
“I know what it's like to be a non-alum,” Carver said. “I've been on both sides now and outside the Baylor spectrum. I want to pop that ‘Baylor bubble’ that people like to talk about. I want the city of Waco to embrace Baylor as Waco’s team.”
Marion Bible, a father of five who cooks for Baylor dining services and helps coach youth sports in his free time, frequently takes advantage of Carver’s ticket-giveback system. Bible grew up selling concessions at Floyd Casey Stadium just so he could watch the Bears play, despite not having enough money to pay for tickets.
Now, with a family of his own, Bible wants to take his children to Baylor sporting events regularly, but it’s often a challenge to stomach lofty ticket prices for a family of seven.
Because of Carver’s ticket-giveback system, Bible took three of his boys to their first Baylor football game at McLane Stadium last fall and their first basketball game this winter.
“Growing up in East Waco and coming from a low-income side of a town, a lot of those kids don’t get to experience any [major sporting events] unless it’s through a non-profit organization, school or a church,” Bible said. “Having someone outside of that like Travis, who can help the community and provide multiple tickets, is big.”
Even when Bible doesn’t use the tickets, he has brothers or friends who coach alongside him in “Young Pro Sports,” a local youth sports organization, who will often take advantage of the tickets and bring their team to the games.
“You should see the impact it has on these kids; I wish I could record it because they’re so happy, and it’s unbelievable,” Bible said. “Not only is Travis helping me, but he’s helping others because these kids have probably never been to games other than high school games and experienced that type of atmosphere with the crowd, the popcorn and the TVs.”
Growing up with football season tickets in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Carver routinely witnessed the Bears lose in various heart-breaking fashions in front of a mostly empty Floyd Casey Stadium. Despite the circumstances, his dad instilled in him at a young age the rule of never leaving a game until you hear the Golden Wave Band play ‘That Good Ol Baylor Line.’
His first “conscious good memory” of Baylor football was in 2004 when the Bears broke a 20-year losing streak to Texas A&M and upset the rival No. 16 Aggies in overtime, 35-34. Now that Baylor football has regained its winning ways, Carver believes the program must take advantage of the positive momentum by opening the doors to new fans.
“You’ve got 200,000 [people] or whatever the population of the greater Waco area is; if we just capture 10,000 of that, it's a game of numbers, and I think it’s extremely important,” he said. “As for the economic side, that's more revenue generated for the program and the school. I see zero negatives to capturing the Waco community.”
Eric Huggins, a Waco native and a local insurance agent, is Carver’s parents' next-door neighbor. In recent years, Carver has developed a relationship with Huggins and routinely gives Huggins and his wife and their three children and two grandchildren tickets.
“I’ve only been to a handful of Baylor games in my entire life, but I’ve been to more games in the time Travis has been doing this than I have my whole life,” Huggins said. “It’s to the point where we’re buying Baylor gear. My grandson is 11 years old, and he’s talking about maybe going to Baylor because he has such a good time going to games. It’s been great for us and a lot of fun.”
Huggins, who’s lived in Waco for over 45 years, can sense the disconnect between Baylor and the local community and believes Carver’s ticket-giveback system helps to alleviate some of those issues.
“We are connected as a community, but a lot of times, it’s like the campus is its own little island that people aren’t directly connected to unless they have family go there or are employed there,” Huggins said. “I believe Travis is doing a good job of bridging that gap and bringing more people from the community into the school and its sports programs.”
Carver’s other argument for turning more locals into fans concerns the fact that the majority of Baylor’s alumni live in places — Dallas-Forth Worth, Austin, San Antonio and Houston — where a two-or-more-hour drive to Waco isn’t always the most plausible.
Even when Baylor down-sized from the 10,000-seat Ferrell Center to the cozier confines of the 7,500-seat Foster Pavilion across Interstate 35, filling every seat on weeknights can often be a struggle.
“You can talk about the money side of things considering that there are more people buying tickets, T-shirts, etc., but on any given Tuesday night, if you go to Foster [Pavilion], even for a Big 12 game, it's not usually completely full,” he said. “We built a smaller arena for a reason, but unfortunately, the majority of our alumni don't stay in Waco when they graduate.”
Huggins added, “What Travis is doing is fantastic because it’s introducing Baylor sports to the people who might not otherwise go, but it’s also filling the seats. It’s good for the team morale to see a full stadium. Travis is filling seats and making connections between local community members and Baylor University.”
As for why Carver has spent countless hours continuing his ticket give-back program across the years, “It’s the only way that I can help,” he says.
During games, Carver, who usually wears a plush bear atop his head and a golden No. 91 jersey with ‘T-Rex’ embroidered on the nameplate, is often approached by various people who profusely thank him for being able to provide them or their families with tickets, a rare luxury that they don’t take for granted.
“It's rewarding knowing that I was able to help somebody; I'm blessed to be able to be in a position to have season tickets or be able to go to those games,” Carver added. “Hopefully, even if it's just one fan, even if all of this effort creates only one actual new Baylor fan, then I did my job, and it was worth it.”
