From Gustine to the Big City: Hunter Thedford

The town of Gustine, Texas lies about 140 miles southwest of Dallas, amongst the farmland and the prairies that make up the part of the state around Stephenville. It’s a small community, a loose grid of streets centered around a downtown that’s watched the world pass it by. The commercial buildings that are packed in close to the corner of Cottonbelt Avenue and Main Street are in various states of disrepair. Toward the end of the street, past the old cotton gin and the old Sinclair gas station is the Methodist church. It’s walls whitewashed and immaculate. The lawn that surrounds it neatly mowed and landscaped.

Gustine is home to just about 460 people, down from 476 at the 2010 census. The local school is located along the highway that runs into Comanche, the county seat, along the old Cotton Belt Railway right-of-way, and it combines children from kindergarten to high school all under one roof. It’s has a such a small enrollment that the high school kids cannot play 11-man football. There’s just not enough of them. Instead, they play the six-man variant in a 200-seat stadium just west of town, a couple hundred yards off of the main highway.

It was in this town that SMU tight end Hunter Thedford grew up. Just 140 miles away from the city of Dallas, but nearly a world apart.

“Lots of cows,” Thedford says as he describes in hometown in a voice that still carries a hint of the dying Texas twang. “Lots of dairy farms. Not very many division-one football players.”

Not many of SMU’s football players are from small towns like Gustine – most are from the suburbs and the cities that make up Texas’ urban cores. And only one played six-man football in high school.

Until his junior year, Thedford attended Gustine School, where he played six-man ball for the Tigers. In that unique variant of football, played in schools across Texas that aren’t large enough to field 11-man teams, the field is smaller, and each player is eligible. It’s a quick moving game, and it’s not uncommon for teams to record point totals that reach into the 80s.

"It’s like flag football but with pads on,” Thedford says. “I was pretty good at it.”

So good, in fact, that his parents thought he could play in college with just a bit more visibility. So they moved the family out to Comanche, about 15 miles west, all to further his football career. But even they couldn’t anticipate Thedford ending up at a school like SMU.

“We never pictured a D-I [school],” Thedford says. “Maybe like some division-two school, maybe get a little lucky.”

At Comanche, he was in a town that was 10 times the size of Gustine, with more than 4300 residents. Instead of playing six-man, he was playing full-fledged 11-man football. He played well in his first year there, but nothing extraordinary. Like his family thought, some division two schools came calling. But things changed, and they changed quickly. Almost overnight, Hunter went from thinking he was going to play D-II football, to holding several division-one offers.

“The tight end coach from UT just showed up at the school, and whenever he showed up, everybody else just showed up out of nowhere,” Thedford says.

Soon SMU offered him, and he committed on the spot, forgoing a prior commitment to UTEP in order to do so.

“I knew how good they were academically,” Thedford says. “All my life, everyone said, ‘you play football, you may get three years in the league, if you’re lucky.’ But an education from SMU would really take care of you and your family for life.”

Thedford has enjoyed his time at SMU, even though it has been rough at times. When he came into the program, he was moved from tight end to defensive end, a position where he had very little experience. After playing sparingly during the 2016 and 2017 seasons, he was moved back to tight end.

Still, life in Dallas has been an adjustment. It’s unlike his hometown in a lot of ways. In Comanche, his family lived on a lake. After practice in high school, he’d go out there to relax and catch a few bass. It’s hard to do that in Dallas, where the sheer size of the Metroplex can often swallow you up.

“The traffic, good god” Thedford says. “The traffic is really weird out here.”

He still battles that traffic when he goes out to Comanche County. Mostly, he goes out there to hunt and fish, and spend time with his family out on their property by the lake. Sometimes, he’ll even stop in Stephenville, where he’ll catch a few Texas Country concerts – his favorite musical genre, something he says he can’t experience in Dallas.

“There’s nobody like that that plays down in Dallas,” Thedford says. “It’s all smaller towns [where they play].”

Eventually, he wants to make his way back out west. Maybe not to Gustine or Comanche, but one of the medium-sized towns out west of Dallas. Right now, Thedford is majoring in finance and economics, and he says he could see himself going into banking – specifically investment banking.

To get into that industry, he knows that he’ll have to stick around Dallas a little bit longer, but that’s not too much of an issue. He wants to gain experience out here before he moves out somewhere where he can settle down, and hunt and fish and listen to his favorite music. Somewhere where he wont have to battle the rush-hour traffic. Somewhere where he feels like he is back in his element.

“I definitely want to get out of Dallas sooner than later,” Thedford says. “Just get back home.”