WALTERS — During Cade Baumann’s sophomore year of high school, second year Walters head football coach Faron Griffin took the stage at a Fellowship of Christian Athletes rally and told his testimony, acknowledging his life struggles and how he overcame the adversity dealt his way.
“When adversity comes at you," Griffin told the athletes at the rally. "You can either run from it or you can face it head on and beat it."
Little did Baumann know how true those words would ring a few years down the road.
In February, Baumann caused a car crash while driving under the influence just west of Walters on State Highway 5.
“I pray that’s the biggest mistake I’ll make the rest of my life,” Baumann said. “You can look at it two ways: ‘I can’t believe you messed up that badly when you were 19.’ Or you can say, ‘I messed up when I was 19, and hopefully for the rest of my life, I’ll be able to be stronger and smarter because of that.’”
The two-vehicle wreck resulted in no fatalities, but did result in injuries and hospitalizations.
Baumann was charged and arrested in Cotton County with a felony DUI for causing an accident that resulted in great bodily harm to others, but because the injuries were not as significant as initially believed, the case was dismissed an refiled as a misdemeanor this spring.
“I think God was watching over both of the vehicles,” Baumann said. “I want to use that mistake to try and influence my friends and future colleagues. We’re not bullet proof no matter what we think. Unfortunately, that night I thought I was.”
Changed for the better, Baumann — a junior college product who won a conference championship playing for Northeastern Oklahoma A&M — is now back on the football field and will vie for significant playing time at the defensive end position at Tulsa this fall.
As he navigates his own adversity, Baumann’s journey is still being written, but it all began not far from the scene of the crash in his hometown of Walters.
Walters wades into winning ways
Heading into Cade’s freshman year of high school, Walters had only 17 players on its football team. In practices, half were on defense, half were on offense.
“It was rough,” said Baumann, who did benefit from a significant amount of playing time at tight end his freshman year because of the low numbers. “That gave me a lot of good experience and built me up mentally.”
Cade’s older brother Cooper was a senior during the younger Baumann’s freshman season — Griffin’s first year at the helm.
Cooper played with four broken ribs his senior season and never told anybody about the injury. Not even the coaches knew.
“Cooper was a real tough dude who pushed me and made me toughen up myself,” Cade said. “He was always that role model for me.”
Cade had played football since the third grade while Cooper didn’t play until his sophomore year, but the elder brother led by example.
“Cooper inspired me to be a guy with more action and less talk,” Cade said. “He taught me that in life — not just football — you get your work done and don’t talk about it. You just go out and do it.”
Doing their jobs on the field soon resulted in winning ways. In Cade and Cooper’s final season playing together, Walters won only one game, but it was the first victory for the Blue Devils in nearly four years. Walters won two games Cade’s sophomore year before moving up from Class A to Class 2A his junior season when Walters went 6-5 and made the first round of playoffs.
By his senior year, Cade, who starred at tight end and at linebacker while winning the Class 2A-3 MVP as a senior, helped lead Walters to an 8-3 season and another first round playoff appearance.
“Winning was a new thing for everyone at Walters,” Baumann said of the Blue Devils’ remarkable turnaround under Griffin, who is now the head coach at Cache. “I think we were hungry to prove how good we were to ourselves — not to anyone else. We were that group of headstrong guys who weren’t big by any standards. We just had a lot of heart.”
New challenges at NEO
Nearly 300 miles northeast of Walters lies Miami, the home of Northeastern Oklahoma A&M football, a premier junior college program.
Each summer, NEO starts with 180 players with intense workouts beginning at 5:45 a.m. to weed out the weak.
Using the Philadelphia 76ers’ coined phrase “trust the process” served as motivation for Baumann and other Division I hopefuls.
“We would always preach ‘trust the process,’” Baumann said. “If you can get through the tough stuff, it’ll pay off with a Division I scholarship.”
Baumann, who was recruited to NEO as a tight end, suffered a hernia and had surgery just days before reporting to summer training.
“Being held out sucked, but it made me that much more hungry,” said Baumann, who was switched to defensive end once he was cleared to start practicing again.
With a detailed defensive scheme that emphasized playing disciplined, Baumann exploded onto the scene as a sophomore defensive end, recording 39 tackles and seven sacks in 2017 while being named First Team All-Southwest JC Conference.
NEO head coach Clay Patterson was “hell-bent” on winning the conference championship last fall and the Norsemen promised to deliver thanks to the foundation they set.
“We grinded through the spring and going into the season we were on a roll,” Baumann said.
As the season wore on, the saying "defense wins championships" rang true for Baumann and Co.
“You have to score points to win a game, but I thought of it as, ‘If they don’t score any points, they can’t win,’” Baumann said.
The Norsemen defense applied Baumann’s mentality and shut down Trinity Valley, an always formidable foe from Texas, to 10 points in a 26-10 victory to claim the conference championship.
“Our defense put them on lockdown the whole game,” Baumann said. “It was emotional knowing all the hard work from the offseason had paid off. Getting a ring was pretty nice, too.”
The Norsemen had their fair share of comradery, with all players living in the same dorm.
“We got to know each other real well — probably too well at times,” Baumann said. “I grew just as close in a year and a half with those guys as I did my 12 years in Walters. It was really a blessing in disguise playing for NEO.”
While at NEO, Baumann, who grew up on a cattle ranch in Walters, got to meet another country boy, linebacker Dillon Hall, who he became close friends with.
Like most JUCOs, NEO isn’t glamorous like OU or OSU when it comes to amenities for football players.
“It’s just a blessing to have gone there,” Baumann said. “I used to think how horrible and small the dorms were. We would joke that we are living here in jail, sharing a community shower. After my experience in real jail following the wreck, I realized it’s a blessing to be able to walk out of my room, enjoy the outside world and train my body to do what I love.”
Next stop, Tulsa
Thanks to a stellar sophomore campaign, Baumann caught the attention of some Division I schools, including the eye of the Golden Hurricane in nearby Tulsa, where he enrolled early this past spring semester.
“I knew I was going to be able to contribute something to this team,” Baumann said. “I want to make a difference, and I want to show people that just because you’re from a junior college doesn’t mean you can’t play.”
This fall, Baumann is expected to make an impact at defensive end, a position he didn’t think he would play at this level.
Over the years, Baumann has been molded from a pass catcher into a pass rusher. The thing he loves most about the latter is that it’s a “reaction position.”
“You try not to think. You just react,” Baumann explained. “You have to be able to trust your skills and react to the game in milliseconds. It’s not always glory in the trenches, but I love it.”
Changed for the better
Long before the accident, Baumann was out at Camp Y’Shua in the Wichita Mountains at summer team camps where the players did two-a-days and grew together.
It was there at Camp Y’Shua that Baumann began to bond with his coach and trust him.
“Coach Griffin has just been like a father figure to me,” Baumann said. “Obviously deep down we all wanted to win football games, but he tried to instill humility in us to grow into men of character.”
“Coach Griffin will tell you like it is, but he’s very motivational and loves the heck out of you.”
After the accident, Griffin’s motivational words about adversity at the FCA rally rang louder than ever before.
Baumann took Griffin’s approach and faced adversity head on and acknowledged it instead of running from it.
“It was a real stupid decision on my part with what I did,” Baumann said. “In high school, if I made a stupid decision, the only person it would affect was me. So when I caused that accident and my actions were harmful to other people, I just didn’t know how to live with myself for a while. I still think about that every day and what could’ve happened to them — and to me as well.”
As the reflective Baumann launches his next football stint with Tulsa, he can’t help but appreciate how a grave mistake taught him valuable life lessons he can carry with him the rest of his life — well beyond the gridiron.
“You don’t understand how nice that freedom is until you don’t have it anymore,” Baumann said. “Life is short. You don’t realize how short it is sometimes.”