Shocker

The thing about Wichita is the wind. It never really stops. It pushes against grain elevators and church steeples and Little League backstops. It blows through the memories, too.

For a while, Wichita State baseball felt like something permanent. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Shockers rose from the prairie and planted a flag in Omaha. Gene Stephenson built a kingdom where nobody expected one. A baseball cathedral in the middle of wheat country. They went to the College World Series seven times. They won it all in 1989. For a generation, summer did not begin until Wichita State arrived in Omaha.

And then, slowly, the game changed.

The money moved elsewhere. The power shifted south and west. New ballparks rose. New conferences formed. The old guarantees disappeared. The Shockers, once a giant, became almost a memory. The banners still hung, but banners are strange things. They remind you of what happened. They also remind you that it isn't happening now. Wichita State has spent more than a decade away from the NCAA Tournament, a drought that would have seemed impossible when Omaha felt like a second home. As a 40-something year old baseball diehard, it seems like a foreign concept.

I wear my Shockers hat around the great state of Florida fairly often. It gets recognized far less than I would like. I hope those days will change.

Baseball programs are like prairie towns. They endure longer than logic suggests. The wind keeps blowing. A kid still picks up a bat. An old coach still tells stories. Somewhere in Kansas, somebody still believes the road to Omaha runs through Wichita. And belief, in places like that, has a way of surviving long after certainty is gone.

-Bump