Baylor junior returns to school (and Chamber) after six years away — in the Navy

Baylor junior Ryan Parker doesn’t look like your typical college student. His hair is neatly parted and groomed, his voice self-assured, and his eyes wise. His fellow members of Baylor Chamber have picked up on these traits and dubbed him “Line Dad.” As a Chamberman, one of his responsibilities is going over the rules of running the Baylor Line with freshmen before each home game. The 18-year-olds in the Line tend to ask him the same question over and over: “Hey man, why are you so old?”

“’Well, I’m a veteran.’”

Parker joined Baylor Chamber as a sophomore at Baylor — back in 2007. “It was right up my alley,” he says. “First off, Baylor’s a great place and to serve and help. That to me is just a natural thing. But there are a lot of neat things you can do as a part of Chamber. You get to throw Homecoming and Family Weekend and Diadeloso, hang banners in the middle of the night, stuff like that.”

Though he loved Baylor, reality began to set in toward the end of his sophomore year. Taking on more loans wasn’t an option, and transferring schools sounded even crazier. But at the back of his mind, he’d always considered the military as an option. Soon enough, he was a U.S. Navy nuclear power engineer on an aircraft carrier in Japan.

During his six years of Naval service, Parker enjoyed a life that was vastly different from his life as a student — but he never forgot about Baylor. “I remember being on a train in Tokyo when Robert Griffin won the Heisman, watching it on my phone waiting for my next stop,” he says. “And if a Baylor game would be on TV, I’d usually be asleep because it was like 2 in the morning. But people knew to come wake me up, and I would get out of bed, watch the game, and go back to bed.”

Eventually, Parker decided he was ready to return to civilian life. He had proposed to his girlfriend (a 2010 Baylor graduate), and unsure of his next step in life, he turned to his future wife. “Amanda said something to me that just rang so true. She said, ‘You’re not gonna be happy unless you go back to Baylor.’”

And so here he is, back at Baylor, majoring in philosophy — and a happy Line Dad.

Sic ’em, Ryan!