His Mother, the Champion

Kramer Robertson was 10 years old in 2005, the first time he cut down a basketball net to celebrate an N.C.A.A. championship for the Baylor Lady Bears. The second time, in 2012, he was 17.

Last Sunday, though, he was all grown up and playing for the Springfield Cardinals, a Class AA team in the St. Louis farm system. Robertson could not be in Tampa, Fla., for the national title game with his mother, Kim Mulkey, the Baylor coach, and his sister, Makenzie Fuller, the associate director of team operations.

Instead, Robertson was on the Cardinals’ team bus, about halfway between Fayetteville, Ark., and Tulsa, Okla., huddled with teammates around a phone that was streaming the broadcast. Just minutes before tipoff, Mulkey had sent him a text message about his game. Now he was watching hers, exulting from afar as the Lady Bears beat Notre Dame in a thriller, 82-81.

“We were in the middle of nowhere, we barely had service, but I was fired up,” Robertson, a shortstop, said by phone the other day. “The first thing I thought to do was FaceTime my brother-in-law. I was not expecting him to answer, I was just so excited and I wanted to be there so bad. But then it said, ‘Connecting,’ and the first face I saw was my mom’s. I didn’t know what to say, so I just started screaming.”

Robertson’s brother-in-law, Clay Fuller, is a former minor leaguer with the Los Angeles Angels. His father, Randy Robertson, is a former quarterback for Louisiana Tech, where Kim Mulkey was an All-American point guard. She has coached at Baylor since 2000, turning around a team that went 7-20 the season before she arrived and setting a powerful example for her son.

“I’ve seen how she’s handled failure and success with humility and never wavered in her morals,” he said. “She always taught me, ‘Nothing great ever gets done without enthusiasm.’ I’ve remembered that throughout my baseball career, especially in the minor leagues, where it can get monotonous and it’s easy to get complacent.”