Written by Ben Cox – Howard Payne athletic director Hunter Sims is a man with a passion for the student athletes in his program. In just over two years as AD, and one year being able to focus solely on the job after turning over Head Coaching duties to Braxton Harris, Sims is driven to see that his students excel in life as well as sports.

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“We always tell our prospective students that they’re going to have an opportunity to be fed spiritually, an opportunity to participate in intercollegiate athletics and they’ll have an opportunity to do something with their degree once they leave here.”

The word opportunity is used on purpose, to show the students “at the end of the day it is still a higher education system. We are not providing this for you to be here and breeze through the process of it.”

He wants to instill an initiative into each student athlete that comes to Howard Payne. “You’ve got to take advantage of every single one of theses opportunities that are given. You’ve got to pick up the ball and run with it.”

Sims plans to improve his program every year by focusing on three areas. “Alumni and community outreach, having a great social media presence, and student athlete experience. If we can focus on those three things every year, then we know we’re going to be progressive and get to where we want to be.”

One of those areas has already seen tremendous growth, according to Sims. “Of all the Division Three teams in the nations, there’s over 450 of them, two and a half years ago we were ranked in the mid 200’s for social media presence. Last year we made it all the way up to 23rd in the nation.”

In the world of Christian higher education, there is a growing struggle to reach youth, Sims says, because more and more do not regularly attend church. “It gets more difficult every year, because Christian schools have a standard and core values that they’re going to stick to and that sometimes fights against society.”

One of the ways Sims is able to challenge the athletes in his program is through hiring the right staff. He uses a broader spectrum of criteria than most schools when reviewing a candidate. “First of all we want to have somebody that’s a strong Christian. Our coaches go to showcases, high schools and are in and out of prospective students homes. They’re the face of the University, so they’ve got to be not only Christian but an Evangelistic Christian because they could be the only part of Howard Payne that student sees.”

Sims also looks for a unique combination of influences in his coaching staff. “We’re going to hire the person first, and and not the experience they have. My purple unicorn in a coach is ‘are they like Billy Graham and also like Vince Lombardi?’ It takes a pretty unique person to fill these roles.”

While looking for that unicorn, Sims has created a sense of focus and drive in the Howard Payne athletic department, with its student athletes best interests at the heart of it all.

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