LUBBOCK, Texas (KCBD) – Texas Tech Athletics is enjoying plenty of Big 12 success in recent years, but it wasn’t always associated with the conference.
The Southwest Conference was founded in 1914 and the Red Raiders got in on the action in 1956. Tech won 11 conference championships in various sports until it dissolved in 1996.
Southwest collection archivist Robert Weaver says that history could’ve gone away forever shortly after.
“At the end of the Southwest Conference’s existence, the conference was just going to destroy those records,” Weaver said, “and so the whole conference would’ve just disappeared.”
That’s where the Southwest Conference archive comes in. It features plenty of pieces showing off core members, including Rice, Texas, TCU and Baylor among others.
From foam statues inspired from Lubbock cartoonist Dirk West, to programs, press books and score sheets, the Southwest Conference lives on here in west Texas and showcases plenty of sports history, along with evolution of athletic competition.
“1969 for example, you see a lot of running, but not a lot of passing,” Weaver said. “If you look at each of these score sheets, which they kept by hand because they didn’t have an electronic way of doing it, you see these stats change over time. You can see people move towards the past until you get right before 1996 when it busted up, when just a few short years later, Mike Leach is going to be at Texas Tech throwing the ball all over the place.”
The Southwest Collection Special Collections Library on campus is the place for you to see these artifacts in person, and the hope is that it will be for decades to come.
“That history is going to be right here waiting for them,” Weaver said. “Whether they’re an undergraduate student, whether they’re the popular press or whether they’re a historian that wants to tell the story of sports and the impact that they’ve had, it’s all right here, and it’s all freely available and the hope is that it’ll be here till the end of days.”
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