Athletics Feature
By Doug Goodnough
Tim Bauer ’82 Has Built a Winning Tradition
One Cheese Sandwich at a Time
T
im Bauer’s 25-plus-year coaching career at
Siena Heights can easily be summed up in two
words: cheese sandwiches.
OPPORTUNITY
Mission Accomplished Series
This series of articles highlights individual
examples of the Siena Heights brand,
“Opportunity U,” and how the university’s
mission is transforming the lives of our
students as well as the world around us.
OK, probably not easily, but there’s a story behind those cheese sandwiches. There’s always a
story with Bauer.
“We didn’t have a whole lot of anything,” said
Bauer of his early coaching years at Siena. “We
had sack lunches, which had two pieces of bread,
a piece of cheese, packets of mayo and mustard,
an apple and freakin’ potato chips. And a bottle
of water. That was lunch. That was all we knew.”
He smirked while telling that story, indicating it
probably now serves more as a badge of honor
than a hardship tale.
Just like those cheese sandwiches, his no-frills,
nothing fancy, get-the-job-done approach was
exactly what Siena Heights needed to build its
track and cross country programs when he took
over as coach in 1984.
Coach Bauer, circa 1992.
Raised in blue-collar farm country of mid central Ohio, Bauer had a hard work and Ohio State
football mentality branded into him. And that’s
the way he’s coached. Using that “Us against the
World” philosophy, Bauer has built the Saints
into one of the top small-college track programs
around. Never mind he hasn’t had a home track
—ever. Never mind that his program budget has
not changed much over the years. Never mind
that some of the doors on the school vehicles
occasionally didn’t work the way they should
on the way to meets.
In the end, it was all about results.
In those 25 years, Bauer’s teams have earned 28
conference championships, more than a dozen
individual or relay national championships, 148
All-Americans and 70 NAIA Scholar-Athletes.
But the pride and sense of accomplishment he
has tried to instill in his athletes drives him as
much as the athletic success.
At 52, Bauer shows no signs of slowing down,
much less changing from his gruff-yet-engaging
ways. Now on the cusp of having a new outdoor
track and facility next fall, he is still a fixture at
Siena Heights University.
Welcome to Siena
Ironically, Bauer first stepped foot on Siena’s
campus wearing another school’s uniform. A
standout athlete at Colonel Crawford High
School in North Robinson, Ohio, Bauer was
poised to earn a college running scholarship
until a bad leg injury derailed his senior year.
He decided to forego college, spending a year
in the “family business”—helping on the family
farm and working 7 days a week on the graveyard shift at the local factory. Eventually though,
his competitive juices got the best of him.
“Finally, one day, I said, ‘I’m done,’” Bauer said
of his decision to stop working and attend college. “I’m tired of working seven days a week
midnight til 8. I was out. It made my Dad mad,
because I was making pretty good money.”
. . . continued on the next page
Reflections Winter ’11
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