Waco’s sporting history is colorful and diverse, not least due to the various minor league baseball teams that have called the city their home. One of the longest standing and most successful of these teams was the Waco Navigators, who played in Katy Park from 1906-1919.

Although the state of Texas did not boast a major league baseball team until 1962, Texans had been playing baseball since the 1860s. Initially, Texas baseball consisted only of a few amateur clubs, but by the 1880s, these teams began to pay some of their players, usually the pitcher, catcher, and shortstop. By 1887, there were at least six professional leagues in the United States, and Texas was not far behind. Spearheaded by John McCloskey, player and manager for the Joplin Independents, the Texas League came into a shaky existence in 1888, teams from Austin, Dallas, Ft. Worth, Galveston, Houston, and San Antonio making up its ranks. The first few years were a rollercoaster for the fledgling league, with some teams sporadically running out of cash for their players’ salaries, others folding in the middle of the season, and the league sometimes terminating seasons ahead of schedule.

Waco’s baseball history began years before the founding of its first minor league clubs. Along with a few amateur teams, Waco was the home of several semi-professional black baseball teams beginning in the 1870s. It was not until 1889 that Waco’s first minor league baseball team began play. Between 1889 and 1906, Waco was the home of several minor league baseball teams, including the Waco Babies, Texans, Tigers, and Steers. Each of these teams belonged to the Texas League. In 1906, during the league’s early turmoil, Waco embraced yet another new baseball team. A public contest decided the team’s name, with the winners, Mrs. W. Sparks and Miss Mattie May Wilkes, selecting the name of “Navigators,” reflecting the efforts of Texans to navigate the Brazos River. The Navigators’ first season was less than impressive, resulting in a final record of thirty-two wins and ninety-six losses. These abysmal numbers earned the Navigators the last-place spot in that year’s Texas League standings. The next four years were equally unimpressive, possibly due to frequent turnover in the manager’s position. Between 1906 and 1911, the Navigators went through eight different managers. Finally, the team hired Ellis Hardy. Formerly the head baseball coach for Texas Christian University, Hardy became the most successful and longest tenured of the Navigator’s managers, and he led the team to its first winning season in 1911. From there the team began to climb, with its record improving steadily until 1914, when the Navigators tied seven-time league champions Houston Buffaloes for first place.

The end of the 1914 season would go down in Texas League history as one of the wildest and most contested finishes the league had ever seen. Going into the last series of the season, the Houston Buffaloes led the Navigators by a single game. Waco easily won both of its slated games against the Dallas Giants, giving them a winning percentage of .670 for the season. Houston, in its turn, came away victorious over the Galveston Pirates in its first game, but their second game remained unfinished, called due to darkness in the fifth inning. They had been losing badly. With the unfinished contest, Houston finished at .673, seemingly earning themselves the pennant. Indignant, Waco contested the unfinished game, saying it had been bright and sunny when the umpires stopped the game. Texas League historian William Ruggles, who attended the game, states that it was indeed dark when the fifth inning began, but by the time Galveston had finished batting the sky had cleared. On top of this, Waco then found out that, earlier that season, Houston had broken a league rule stating that the first game of a doubleheader had to be nine innings long, stopping at seven innings in the first game of a doubleheader against Austin. Texas League President W.R. Davidson threw out the result of the shortened game, ignoring the rule that stated the teams had to replay the contest. However, he had also learned that Waco had played a game with a player acquired after intraleague trades had ended. Unfortunately for Waco, Davidson threw out that game as well. Eventually, league administration credited both teams with records of 102-50, and the pennant race ended in a tie.

The Waco Navigators won the pennant for the next two seasons, making them back-to-back-to-back champions, an impressive feat. The Navigators continued playing until 1919. The 1919 season was a dismal one, with the team posting a 59-88 record, their only losing record since 1910. At the same time, the growing city of Wichita Falls, Texas, was experiencing an oil boom. Suddenly flush with cash, a Wichita Falls group bought the Navigators and moved the team, renaming them the Spudders after the oilfield slang for starting an oil well (not potatoes).

That same year, the newly organized Texas Colored League began to play. Among its founding teams was Waco’s newest minor league team: the Waco Black Navigators. The Black Navigators would go on to spend 1919 and 1920 in Waco, before moving to San Antonio as the Black Aces. The Black Navigators were not the last professional baseball team Waco would see in the twentieth century. Between 1920 and the demolition of Katy Park in the 1960s, Waco was the home of the Cubs, the Black Cardinals, the Dons, and the Pirates. Although Katy Park no longer stands, and Waco has not boasted a professional team since the 1950s, Wacoans have retained their love of the national pastime and recall their old clubs fondly.

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Until the 1990s, hockey teams in the South were few and far between. The heat prevalent in the southern states did not exactly lend itself to ice-based sports, leading locals to favor warm-weather sports such as baseball and football. However, the National Hockey League’s (NHL’s) expansion teams began to gradually make their way further south throughout the 1990s, spreading a new interest in the sport. In 1993, the expansion reached Texas when the Minnesota North Stars moved to Dallas, becoming the beloved Dallas Stars.

With these new NHL teams came their minor league counterparts. The majority of these new minor league teams belonged to the Western Professional Hockey League (WPHL), which operated from 1996-2001 and stretched from New Mexico to Mississippi. In 1996, Waco became home to one of Texas’ five (soon to become eleven) WPHL teams, the Wizards. The Waco Wizards played in the WPHL’s first ever game on October 16, 1996, against the Central Texas Stampede from Belton. The game resulted in an unfortunate 5-4 loss for Waco.

The Wizards played their home games in Waco’s Heart of Texas Coliseum, now called the Extraco Events Center. Their first home game exemplified both the struggles and the vibrancy of minor league play in the South. Waco’s humidity caused a thick fog to gather over the ice, and the Wizards’ administration had to send for dehumidifiers from Dallas to dry out the building. They were able to clear some of the fog, but the glass around the rink remained foggy throughout the game, blocking the enthusiastic but somewhat confused fans. On top of that, a creative and well-intentioned mascot stunt went awry. During the pre-game ceremonies, the Waco mascot was lowered from the Coliseum’s ceiling in full Wizard costume. Unfortunately, the bulky costume got in the way of the mascot attempting to release himself from the straps after the stunt, resulting in him hanging for a while over the ice.

In their first season, the Wizards averaged 3,161 fans in attendance (about one third of the Coliseum’s capacity) and finished with a 30-34 record. The team experienced a sophomore slump the next year, averaging 2,048 fans in attendance each game and finishing 18-51, a WPHL record for a team’s worst season. However, new head coach Todd Lalonde turned the team around in its third season and brought the Wizards to the playoffs after achieving the Wizards’ first ever winning record with 40 wins and 29 losses. Despite the Wizards’ success, attendance stayed low, with an average of 2,137 fans a game.

In their three and a half seasons, the Wizards replaced their manager four times and never had a player advance to the National Hockey League (NHL). Their overall record came to 99 wins and 114 losses. During the first three seasons of operation, the team reportedly lost three million dollars. In 1999, the Wizard’s owner, Ohio businessman Joe Milano, sold the team to Rick Dames, a radio station owner from Corpus Christi. Dames in turn partnered with baseball executives Stu and Sue Kehoe in an attempt to revitalize the dying franchise. Their attempts were unsuccessful, and when they were unable to make their lease payment to the Coliseum, the team folded after only having played 27 games in the 1999-2000 season. The Wizards went out the same way they began: with a loss, this time to the Corpus Christi IceRays.

The WPHL lasted another year after the Wizards folded before merging with the Central Hockey League, which in turn lasted until 2013. The WPHL saw a resurrection in 2024, when a group of minor league teams in California came together to revive the once-beloved league. Although the Wizards only existed for a few years, they sparked a love for hockey in the people of Waco.

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As “America’s pastime,” baseball also imbibed the country’s original sin: racism. This scourge haunted the game from its earliest days, but by the start of the twentieth century the formal segregation of baseball was complete and remained so until 1947. Nevertheless, black baseball persisted, leaving an indelible mark on the sport. While black baseball in Waco shared similarities with the game elsewhere in the nation, the players it molded and its local legacies deserve recognition. To remember baseball in the city and at Katy Park without its black teams and players is to tell only part of the story.

Starting in the 1870s, black baseball in Waco operated independently but laid the groundwork for future developments. Waco fielded several unnamed teams from the 1870s to the 1890s, one of which joined the Texas Colored Baseball League in 1888. Unfortunately, league play never materialized. From 1897 to 1898, the Waco Yellow Jackets played regionally at their home field at Golden Gate Park off of South First Street. The Yellow Jackets dominated due to the superior pitching of a preacher’s son from Calvert, Texas, named Andrew “Rube” Foster. Waco, with its booming cotton industry, presented Foster with a larger market to showcase his skills and launched his legendary career. His “fadeaway” pitch (screwball) changed baseball, and Foster’s belief in black baseball led to the formation of the professional Negro National League in 1920. As baseball entered the twentieth century, the game retained its rural connections but expanded in urban areas.

Waco produced several teams and players in the 1910s and 20s that developed the game at the semipro and professional levels. Just as Rube Foster left Texas to pursue baseball in Chicago, Waco produced two future ballplayers who would go on to play for the Negro Leagues Foster inaugurated: Andrew Lewis Cooper and Crush Holloway. Cooper, a southpaw pitcher, spent the majority of his professional baseball career as a player and manager of the Kansas City Monarchs. An outfielder known for his assertive base running, Holloway played professional ball with the Indianapolis ABCs and the Baltimore Black Sox. He began his career in 1919 with the Waco Black Navigators, the city’s premier black baseball club and a member of the Texas Colored League that played their games at Katy Park. The lives and careers of Holloway and Cooper followed the flow of the Great Migration as African Americans left the rural South for the industrial North. This movement of African Americans affected Waco’s ability to consistently provide a market for semipro black baseball. It dropped out of Texas Colored League after only a year and later sporadically participated in the Texas-Oklahoma-Louisiana League. Nevertheless, smaller recreational teams like the Waco Black Taborians played regular games at Taborian Park on South Second Street and on special occasions like Juneteenth. Multiple levels of organization continued to characterize black baseball in Waco for the next few decades.

Into the 1930s, black baseball endured in Waco exhibiting innovations to the game eventually adopted by white teams. Now a part of the Texas-Oklahoma-Louisiana League, Waco’s Black Cardinals achieved minor league status in 1930. They participated in a historic first in Texas baseball when they played the state’s initial night game in May 1930 against the visiting Kansas City Monarchs. Within weeks, Katy Park put up permanent lights for its white team, the Waco Cubs. The introduction of night baseball—because it allowed players to earn more money by playing more games—emerged out of black baseball to impact the entire sport. Additionally, black baseball introduced the practices of numbered uniforms and utilizing protective gear. The latter became a necessity due to the quick, aggressive style of play that characterized black baseball, in contrast to the white game that hinged on homeruns. While the historical record remains spotty, it appears that black baseball for the duration of its existence in Waco welcomed white spectators in a separate section. Though formally segregated, these innovations illustrate the cross-pollination that occurred between black and white baseball, advancing the game.

It was also during the 1930s that another Waco product, George T. Walker, made his debut in the Negro Leagues. Walker pitched for the Homestead Greys and the Kansas City Monarchs from 1937 to 1943. While his was not an exceptional career, the right-hander shared in the successes of his legendary teammates, Satchel Paige and Buck O’Neil. Walker continued to play baseball into the 1950s, but his career shows how the desegregation of baseball in 1947 led to the decline of the Negro Leagues and black semipro baseball. In Waco, the destruction of Katy Park from the 1953 tornado also contributed to the end of local black baseball. While it resulted in obvious benefits, the integration of baseball in Waco and around the country also meant the loss of a significant African American institution.

The semipro and independent status of black baseball in Waco does not diminish its importance. These tiers helped develop the game and its talent. Surveying this topic at the local level illustrates how national matters of racism and sports functioned in our community.

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Founded in 1951, the Word label helped spark the multimillion-dollar genre of Christian Contemporary Music (CCM). And it was sportscaster and ministry student Jarrell McCracken who gave it a voice.

McCracken was working in radio to finance his graduate education when someone approached him and asked that he use his broadcasting expertise to reach youth by combining ministry and sports. Overcoming his initial reluctance, McCracken warmed to the idea and recorded “The Game of Life”—a fictionalized football match between good and evil—using his resources at KWTX. His play-by-play of the supernatural clash for radio station WORD proved a hit with area youth groups. Each spin of the record brought McCracken requests to purchase copies of it. The only problem was he didn’t have any. So McCracken pulled together the funds to finance the pressing of one hundred copies. Through their popularity the young man sensed a market for sacred records. He started Word Records in Waco to meet that demand.

Initially, McCracken ran Word out of his apartment, bringing his friends Henry Sorelle and Ted Snider in to help him run the company. During the 1950s few labels produced religious music, and Word found ways to edge out the competition. In its early years it signed artists like Frank Boggs, got into production and distribution, and used record-of-the-month clubs to disperse music. Outside of religious records, Word sold sheet music, Christian literature, and educational resources. The label soon outgrew McCracken’s apartment and, after brief stints at other locations, moved in 1960 to its longtime headquarters at 4800 West Waco Drive.

The year before its move, Word hired Kurt Kaiser as its Director of Artists and Repertoire. Trained in piano and composition at Northwestern University, Kaiser’s ear and desire for outreach diversified Word’s offerings, charting a new trajectory for Christian music. Kaiser signed gospel juggernaut George Beverly Shea in 1975, and also worked with Ralph Carmichael to write a folk musical for youth titled Tell It Like It Is. Cooperating with secular musicians who wanted to produce sacred music also provided Word an opportunity to expand its audience. In the 1960s and 70s, it acquired the smaller Canaan and Myrrh labels. Its publicity and distribution operations grew as well. As it entered the 1980s, Word’s multimedia approach continued at the forefront of CCM as the genre developed.

For the first thirty years of the company, Word immersed itself in the Waco community. When McCracken first started Word, Waco businessmen provided the young entrepreneur with capital and connections. Word later returned the community’s gesture, offering college scholarships to local high school graduates and providing jobs to many Baylor students. The label drew musicians such as Ken Medema to perform in Waco, in addition to sponsoring many community events featuring the Christian arts. Word held a reputation in town as a respectable company that felt like a family. It invested in cultivating the support of Wacoans, many of whom endorsed its mission. Word’s business and community commitments reaped dividends.

The label grew exponentially alongside CCM. In 1974, ABC purchased the company, eventually moving it near Fort Worth. Leaving Waco meant that Word sacrificed some of its communal feel. The transition also led to Jarrell McCracken departing the company in 1986. By the 1990s Word was in Nashville and the label housed popular artists like Sandi Patti and Amy Grant. Still one of the leading producers of Christian music today, the label retains its initial ministerial goal. Word went out from Waco and aided in the development of Christian music. Its impact still reverberates in the city and Christian music industry.

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