Campus Fireside Lounge Named For Texas Wranglers

By Jordan Schraeder in 40 Acres on November 8, 2011 at 2:23 pm | No Comments

The Texas Wranglers have left their mark—quite literally—on the Forty Acres.

The Texas Wranglers Fireside Lounge is the first room to be named in the Student Activity Center that opened last January. The naming is the result of a significant endowment the Wranglers, who are the official men’s basketball spirit group, established to bring distinguished lecturers, conferences, symposiums, and plays to campus.

At the ribbon-cutting ceremony on Oct. 29, members of the Texas Wranglers Alumni Association joined cowboy hat-clad active members to celebrate the dedication, driving in from Houston and Dallas just to see their beloved organization’s name on the orange wall.

“This is a monumental event in the history of the Wranglers,” said Kevin J. Lilly, who founded the organization in 1979. “It’s the culmination of 30 years and the work of multiple people. It’s extraordinarily unprecedented.”

The endowment was established with the help of the attendees themselves: it was a Wranglers alum who actually wrote the first check, and a group of alumni aged 25 and younger pledged almost $30,000 toward bettering the University.

In addition to simply becoming immortalized on campus, the organization has another reason to be thankful.

“I remember when we let the first students into the building in January,” SAC director Crystal King said at the ceremony. “They walked into the fireside lounge and said, ‘This is the coolest room I’ve ever seen.’ So you are very lucky to have the coolest room on campus named after you!”

The Texas Wranglers are a group of men that are dedicated to espousing good character and responsibility and serving others. Learn more about them here.

Wranglers alumni, left to right: Bryce Barrow, BS ’83, Life Member; Kevin J. Lilly, BBA ’82; Louis Kissling, BBA ’84, Life Member; Cletus Bianchi, BBA ’87, Life Member.

Photo by Zhongyu Yuan.

Tags: student activity center, Texas Wranglers, Wranglers Alumni Association