The origin story begins on a Tuesday
Not a gameday
Not a sweltering, 100-degree grueling preseason camp session in the notorious Houston heat.
Days after an 66-7 loss at UT-Martin, an Football Championship Subdivision Playoff fixture under Jason Simpson, in this season’s first month, Braxton Harris noticed a shift in his Houston Christian University players’ approach.
Today, that Tuesday afternoon change stands as bedrock in a break through campaign for HCU and its first-year head coach Braxton Harris.
“We go play Western Kentucky and that’s obviously a really good football team, and we get down 24-0 in the first quarter,” Harris told FootballScoop, “and our kids came back and fought and got it within two scores late (trailed 38-22 in the fourth quarter). That was kind of a piece for me. I saw the fight, that we’re not going to lay it down, and I think that gave a lot of confidence that we could compete.
“Then we go play the next week against UT-Martin and get drubbed. Absolutely drubbed. Then we came back on the Tuesday after that game and started to put some things together.”
What the Huskies have put together since that time – Tuesday, Sept. 19 – has been five wins against just two losses – one of those a two-point setback against Lamar.
Saturday, HCU hosts nationally ranked Incarnate Word with an opportunity to add to its historic first season under Harris.
At 6-4, the Huskies already have clinched their first winning season in program history and already own more victories this season than in the previous three years combined.
The win that started it all, at Southeastern Sept. 23 in a Southland Conference game, marked HCU’s first-ever win against the program.
“To a certain degree you’ve just gotta make a choice,” said Harris, who garnered national acclaim for his role in helping the Campbell Camels engineer consecutive recruiting classes that not only were among the tops in FCS but outranked dozens of FBS programs. “Are we going to keep doing things the way they were done in the past or have a different Tuesday?
“In that Southeastern game coming after UT-Martin, we had absolutely our best week of work. We came out Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday energetic, enthusiastic, locked in with focus. The guys put that work in that week and saw the results they could get. They started connecting dots between what it takes to win and actually winning.”
Harris presents his Huskies program with a five-tiered pyramid for success: Win first downs, win explosive plays, win the turnover battle, “Huskies don’t beat Huskies” and win the fourth quarter.
But those gameday maxims still plant their roots on Tuesdays.
“The foundation moving forward is our guys believe now more than ever in Tuesday,” said Harris, who noted that 31 of 32 NFL teams have sent scouts to the Huskies’ practices this fall and who again has barnstormed the recruiting trail with his first full HCU class lurking around No. 10 in FCS. “Commit to Tuesday. We use the word commit because it’s a choice. You have to make a choice to commit to Tuesday. Be physically, spiritually, mentally locked in to Tuesdays.
“That’s the foundation of which we’ve built upon. We go good against good, 1s vs 1s in practice, we’ll do it this week. The kids believe those reps make them better players for Saturday, and that helped us win that Texas A&M-Commerce game, helped us win the McNeese game when we had 14 points and 111 rushing yards in the fourth quarter.”
All of which leaves Harris focusing on the present and dreaming about the future.
“You can look at our schedule and look at our results and see the results,” said Harris, a Texas native. “We’re a couple plays away from this game on Saturday to be an opportunity for us to make the playoffs.
“We’ve always had the city of Houston, but now we’re a Division I program that’s a competitive program in the Southland Conference. That’s kind of like taking chocolate and peanut butter and putting it together and you got a Reese’s cup. There’s not much better than that.”