Years in the making, UTRGV football works to squash any lingering doubts

For the past three years, Vaqueros Head Coach Travis Bush has wanted nothing more than to get his team on the field and start playing some football.

“I’m excited for the young men that have been here since day one,” he says, “that get to run outta that tunnel and see that packed place.”

The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley is days away from making history. The first collegiate football game for the area has been in the planning stages for years – the idea stage for about a decade and the dream stage for as long as anyone in the Valley can remember.

But for communications major, redshirt junior and defensive back Marcus “MJ” Heard Jr., it hasn’t quite sunk in.

“ I don’t know what to expect. Like, honestly, like we are finna play in front of 12 -13,000 fans. The game is sold out,” he says.  “That’s gonna be a moment, you know, one for history. And hopefully we’re popping some fireworks because we’re scoring some touchdowns, of course. It’s gonna be special. I can’t imagine it.”

There are still 3,000 student tickets that will be available the Monday morning before each Saturday game, as well as the possibility of grabbing some tickets if the visiting team doesn’t use all of theirs. Those might be up for grabs Friday mornings before the games. UTRGV warns against buying secondhand tickets from an online reseller as the prices are marked up astronomically.

But for the most part, chances to see a home game in person as the general public are slim.

For a team to never have once played a game – let alone set foot on their new stadium turf by training camp – selling out all the home games of the season might come as a surprise to some. But to others, it’s not.

The Rio Grande Valley, located on the southern border, is no stranger to Friday Night Lights – with football, marching band, cheerleaders, tailgates, mums and, of course, the fans all engrained in Valley culture, just like it is for every other place in Texas.

Cowboys, Longhorns and Aggies jerseys are often seen while out and about during football season. But now it’s become commonplace to see one more in the mix; white, bright orange with the Vaquero “V.”

Alisa and Ben Gonzalez knows those jerseys well. The husband-and-wife team own Vaquero Outfitters in Edinburg. As a second business to their scrap metal shop in Weslaco, retail has proven time-consuming.

“ This is a 70-hour job, you know,” Ben says. “We’re always working. Well, my wife is the one. She’s working at night, she’s working in the morning, she’s working on the weekends – but all thanks to the community.”

The Gonzalez’s made a bet on Vaquero’s athletics, licensing the name and logos and pretty much only selling Vaqueros merch or gear for games. It’s a bet that, up until recently, many would’ve been hard-pressed to make.

Alisa, a 19-year educator, is an alumna of the previous iteration of UTRGV, the University of Texas Pan American. She says she didn’t feel that connection when she took classes there.

“ It felt more of a commuter school because it was a lot of us from the Rio Grande Valley that we would travel, you know, every day to class and then go back home to our hometown, she said. “I was never really involved in afterschool activities or going to any of the athletic events or I wouldn’t attend any of the organizations. For me, it was go to class and then go back to Weslaco – job, homework, all of that.”

The attendance at the area’s collegiate sports had a history of being dismal. Before UT-Pan American and UT-Brownsville were combined, if the topic of getting a college football team ever popped into conversion, the next question was “would anyone even go?” And, once the universities combined into UTRGV, was there gonna be anything different?

No stranger to these questions, Athletic Director Chasse Conque knew it would be a large hurdle to overcome.

“ We can call it like it is as we sit here today, because we’re proud of what we finished this past year,” he said. “But our attendance at our other sporting events, you know, it wasn’t where we wanted it to be. So if you threw football in the middle of all of this, was it gonna really help everybody across the board and get all of our programs off dead center?”

In February of 2016, after the first class of UTRGV began walking its halls for the winter semester, the university announced its plans to conduct a football feasibility study. At the time, Conque’s predecessor, Chris King, along with University President Guy Bailey, ushered in the $100,000 study.

The study committee, chaired by famed Longhorn head coach Mack Brown, concluded its findings in August 2017, essentially laying a pathway for the university to bring collegiate football to the Rio Grande Valley.

Conque explained that the university’s new vision for athletics had to catch up with their current athletic infrastructure. Of the 16 sports inherited by UTRGV, only four were equipped with locker rooms.

Conque says this is where the investment comes in.

“And so as you sit here thinking, ‘all right, we want our coaches and our student athletes to compete for Division 1 championships, but they don’t have a place to change before practice, before class, a place to hang up their cleats,'” Conque said. “Those are things that we needed to address quickly.”

This investment into the overall athletics infrastructure seems to have had a positive impact on other UTRGV programs. Vaqueros baseball has seen record attendance the past two seasons, and a steady increase in wins.

Conque says the university is just finishing $180 to $200 million in construction, which affects all of the now-18 sports programs.

That money also comes from an increase of almost $12 a credit hour on students’ tuition for the facilities fee, voted on by the Student Government Association in 2021.

But it’s best not to underestimate the football superfans. Alex Benavides and his wife Cindy threw their support behind the program early, donating funds to become part of the university’s football founders.

 ”Hearing that they’re going to bring a football team, well that was the game-changer for me because football is my main sport. I love football,” Benavides said.

Alex Benavides is the first assistant DA for Hidalgo County. Sitting in his office and joined by his wife, a lawyer with her own private practice, the couple is decked out in Vaquero gear – Alex with a football jersey and Cindy in a bright Vaquero-orange dress with a bejeweled Vaquero bag to match.

Alex continues:

“And so when you have two things that I care about very much – community and sports – and you combine the two of them… Well, I’m all-in, right? That’s all you need to get my support. And so now, even though I’m an Aggie, I put 100% of my support and our family support behind UTRGV, behind the Vaqueros.”

Alex is originally from Zapata while Cindy is from La Feria. Together they now live with their three boys in Weslaco. Cindy says since Alex is an Aggie, they were technically a house divided.

“I’m a Longhorn,” she says. “We actually met at Texas Tech, but the other school that has united our family is the Vaqueros because we’ve dedicated our professional lives to working here in the Valley. And a big part of being professionals in the Valley is also supporting your community.”

The team’s personal connections to the community vary as a few players and coaches, including Head Coach Travis Bush, hail from the Valley. Bush’s own father, Bruce Bush, is a legendary high school football coach and is inducted into the RGV sports hall of fame.

And as any university aiming to make a name for itself does, UTRGV recruited far and wide. For Alex Benavides, the prospect of these students making the Valley their home is worth their investment.

“ Valley people really care about their valley and their community,” he says. “And wherever those kids come from – maybe we’re recruiting someone from Oklahoma or Washington State – it doesn’t matter. Once they get here, they become ours, right?

They’re one of our kids and we want the best for them and we want them to succeed and to do well and to graduate and have great careers eventually. We want them to do well. And of course, along the way, we’re having fun watching sports.”

With UTRGV’s inaugural game set to kick off Saturday at 7 p.m. against Sul Ross State, the Vaquero’s are one step closer to showing what belief in a wild dream can get you.

Stay tuned for part 2 of this story where the Texas Standard takes a closer look on the field to see just what players and coaches need to build a Division 1 team up from scratch. 

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