July 31, 2008

By Vahe Gregorian, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

ST LOUIS -- Donald Thomas is from Freeport, Bahamas. Until two or three years ago, he wanted nothing so badly as to become a certified-public accountant.

Sean McLelland is from Harlingen, Texas, where he loved hunting.

The two have never met and have little in common.

But what is mutual is monumental, in more ways than one.

When the Beijing Olympics begin next month, Thomas will compete for the Bahamas as a high-jumper — who won the 2007 world championship — and McLelland will be skeet-shooting for Team USA.

And each has been sprung to Beijing by way of ... Lindenwood University in St. Charles, where McLelland is part of a program that has won five straight national titles and Thomas changed the course of his life on a dare in the school cafeteria.

When a friend on the track team doubted Thomas could high-jump 6 feet 6, the junior varsity basketball player did — then proceeded to clear 6-8, 6-10 and 7 feet that very day.

"You can't try to figure out something like this," then-Lindenwood track coach Lane Lohr told the Post-Dispatch at the time. "You just have to enjoy it."

That was his jump-start to last year's world championship, where the IAAF Yearbook reported that 25-year world record holder Javier Sotomayor told him, "You're the guy (who) can break my record ... I can see it happening. And sooner than you think. Maybe by the summer of 2008."

Lindenwood athletics director John Creer still chuckles at the emergence of Thomas, calling it "a fluke of a situation."

But if Thomas and McLelland's ascension to Olympians might seem quirky or coincidental, they also reflect a fundamental strategy for saving the school itself nearly 20 years ago.

With about 230 of 800 enrolled students living on campus, an endowment hovering around $1 million and decomposing facilities, Lindenwood University was teetering on the brink of termination when Dennis Spellmann took over as president in 1989.

By the time of his death in 2006, Spellmann had resuscitated the school founded in 1827 as the second-oldest higher-education institution west of the Mississippi River.

The man often described as a visionary reportedly raised the endowment to more than $50 million, enhanced facilities and faculty and radically increased enrollment: Some 3,500 students now live on the main campus, and the school overall has more than 14,000, counting satellite campuses and nontraditional students.

In addition to overseeing such innovative concepts as the now-defunct "Pork for Tuition" program that offered rural families tuition discounts for the retail price of livestock that would be slaughtered and served in the dining hall, Spellmann believed sports could help stoke enrollment and campus energy.

"That was one of his primary (devices)," said Dr. James Evans, Spellmann's successor.

So the NAIA school that had fewer than 10 sports added football. Reflecting the will of the man Creer called "the father of it all," programs have ballooned since. Lindenwood now has 44 varsity teams involving about 1,500 students, including at the junior varsity and developmental level.

Few, if any, schools at any level offer that many programs. And though accounting methods may differ — Lindenwood, for instance, counts cheerleading as both a men's and women's sport — the variety is staggering.

Among Lindenwood's offerings: women's dance, wrestling, ice hockey, synchronized swimming and synchronized skating; men's and women's bowling and lacrosse and men's roller hockey.

While declining to specify the athletics budget, citing its complications, Evans said the athletic department makes money that is reinvested in the university, possible because coaching salaries are in line with faculty pay and traveling expenses and such are kept to a minimum.

Even so, Lindenwood has distinguished itself by finishing in the top 10 of the NAIA Director's Cup standings for the last decade. The school's most successful programs are roller hockey and shooting, which is why McLelland said he decided to attend Lindenwood instead of the University of Texas.

"They don't (offer shooting), and Lindenwood is the only scholarship program that actively pursues shooters," McLelland said.

The school, he added, is "very financially and academically supportive."

So much so that he was allowed to take incompletes last semester to train and has been preparing to take three finals immediately after the Olympics before he begins his final semester.

McLelland's Olympic berth perhaps is particularly timely for Lindenwood, given that its shooting program was left reeling by a drinking incident on the way home from the national championship in Texas. Coach and program founder Joe Steenbergen was fired, and the program was temporarily suspended.

McLelland was not on the trip, and Evans believes his Olympic exploits can help heal the incident.

Incoming shooting coach Shawn Dulohery, a 2004 Olympian, also believes that McLelland's stature can help soothe "the slap in the face" of the program.

And more.

"That's a very, very small fraternity to belong to," said Dulohery, an instructor for the U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit in Fort Benning, Ga., who will take over day-to-day operations next year. "It's just a speck, when you look at the whole globe, to think you're one of the top competitors in the world."

Having two such specks in this span is all the more amazing, said Dulohery, adding, "What a trip the university gets to take."

A trip McLelland hopes includes meeting Thomas, a 2006 graduate whose picture McLelland has seen.

"That would be excellent," said McLelland, adding that he'll look for him in the Olympic Village — where they'll represent not only their countries but also Lindenwood.