Dec. 27, 2010

By Jerry Hill

Fred Ellis couldn't have dreamed up a better story than this.

The fourth-year junior guard/forward from Sacramento, Calif., became the first person in his family to graduate from college when he picked up his diploma at Baylor's Dec. 18 winter commencement ceremony at the Ferrell Center.

"It's real big," said Ellis, a speech communication major who will begin working on a master's degree next semester in sports management. "Growing up, a lot of my family didn't even go to college. My mom said she went to junior college for like half a semester and said she was going to go back, and that was 30 years ago. It just feels good. My mom and everybody back home are proud of me. The fact that I can represent my family and my city, it means a lot to me."

Ellis, one of 32 Baylor student-athletes who graduated, becomes head coach Scott Drew's 18th player to earn his degree in the last seven years. And that doesn't include longtime NBA player David Wesley, who returned as a student assistant and graduated in May 2009.

"What's happened is the team's formed a culture where they're excited for each other to graduate," Drew said. "Last year, when Tweety (Carter) and Josh (Lomers) graduated, you had Kevin Rogers drive down from Dallas, Henry (Dugat) drive up from Houston, you had Curtis (Jerrells) come up from San Antonio. Ekpe (Udoh) was in Atlanta or Los Angeles, wherever he was working out, and flew in to see graduation. When you get past players coming back to watch players walk across the stage, that means a lot. Normally, graduations aren't something that people flock to, unless it's their (own) graduation."

The graduation ceremony was just the start of a crazy day for Ellis.

With the Bears playing Gonzaga that afternoon in "The Showcase," a nationally televised game at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, Texas, Ellis had his name called first in a pre-arranged scheduling change that allowed him to rush off the stage as soon as picks up his diploma.

Not that he would have missed this for anything.

"I wasn't worried," said Ellis, who had his mom and about 10 other family members in town for the ceremony. "If I had been the last one and had to run to Dallas, I would have done it just to graduate. It's going to be emotional, I know that much. I'm not going to lie, I might shed a tear or two. But I know we've got to hurry, (because) we've got a game to play. I'm going to be so amped, I probably won't even think about it until the next day."

From an early age, Ellis said his mother, Michele Woodson, pushed him much harder in the class room than he was ever pushed on the basketball court.

"My mom was pushing grades before anything," he said. "When I was little and I tried to play sports, she was like, `You're not going to play unless you get good grades.' She was really the main force to put me on this path."

While he still has a year and a half of basketball left to play and won't start working on his sports management degree until next month, Ellis said, "hopefully I can take over Ian McCaw's job and be Baylor's athletic director one day."

It wasn't quite as much of a time crunch for Whitney Zachariason. The 6-2 senior forward graduated with a general studies degree at the morning ceremony and then left that afternoon for a trip to the Bahamas with the second-ranked women's basketball team.

"That's pretty exciting to get to go to the Bahamas and then go home. That's a nice Christmas break," said Zachariason, who transferred from the University of Arkansas halfway through her freshman year. "I'm really excited about it, because they went to the Virgin Islands (in 2008) without me. So I'm pretty excited about going to the Bahamas. I've never been."

For the bowl-bound Baylor football team, Saturday's commencement ceremony was a break from the practice routine for senior cornerback Antareis Bryan, junior running back Terrance Ganaway and third-year sophomore quarterback Robert Griffin III.

"My mom always told me that they can take my ability away, but they can never take away my education," said Ganaway, a general studies major from DeKalb, Texas, who transferred from the University of Houston after his freshman season. "I'm the first one in my family to graduate from college. So I'm real proud, really happy. But I'm not going to stop here. I'm going to keep going to school and get my master's in sports pedagogy. Hopefully I'll be going into the coaching world. But if not, there are a lot of different possibilities out there. I definitely want to work with kids and help mentor the young men growing up in these years."

Griffin III graduated from Copperas Cove High School a semester early to enroll at Baylor in January 2008. But he took it up another notch in finishing his degree in political science in just three years.

"It wasn't (a goal to finish early)," said Griffin III, a second-team All-Big 12 pick who passed for a school-record 3,195 yards this season in leading the Bears to their first bowl game in 16 years. "I just decided that not everybody gets to do that, so it's an exciting thing to do. I guess I've lived an accelerated life. I've done more in 20 years than most people have done in a lifetime."

A fifth-year senior from Dallas Carter High School, Bryan calls graduation the "icing on my cake."

"I can honestly say that I feel like it was a big accomplishment achieving both that goal and making it to a bowl game this year," said Bryan, who's also a general studies major. "My mom's proud of me, and I'm pleasing a lot of people by doing it for my family and just making it . . . just making it through college. A lot of the athletes that I came in with weren't able to make it through college or even a year out of Baylor. So I feel blessed to be able to do this."