There is one constant that can be found within TLU athletics. From the first football game to the final softball game, and everything in between, you are going to find Bryce Hayes running the show.

If you’ve seen a gameday post on Instagram, that was Bryce. If you’ve heard the PA announcer in Memorial Gymnasium, that was Bryce. If you’ve read the recap of a Bulldog win, that was Bryce. If you’ve seen a guy running around taking pictures, yeah you guessed it, that was Bryce.

This guy does a whole lot for student-athletes, coaches, and the entire TLU athletics program daily. All his work is done mostly behind the scenes, but I wanted to change that with this article. I sat down with Bryce to walk me through his journey and everything he learned along the way to becoming one of the youngest full-time SID ‘s in the country. We all know the Bryce that works at TLU, but there is so much more to his story that brought him to Seguin.

I started with wanting to get to know Bryce as a kid, and what he was doing growing up in Memphis, Tennessee.

“I always loved sports growing up. I started playing sports when I was three, and I was actually a baseball player first. Honestly if you asked anyone that I grew up around, they’d say I was a better baseball player than football player…but I was three sport-athlete growing up playing, of course, baseball and football, but also some basketball, too. I even divvied in wrestling for a very brief period, but I broke my arm so that didn’t last very long. I started every morning watching ESPN. I couldn’t get dressed if I wasn’t watching SportsCenter before going to school.”

Bryce Hayes

Along with playing sports in his early years, Bryce is also a country boy at heart, as well.

“I grew up riding horses on a quote unquote ‘farm’ at my house. I spent a lot of time at my Grandma’s house feeding chickens, dealing with the pigs, that type of deal. So, contrary to popular belief there is a countryside in Memphis that a lot of people don’t get to see.”

Bryce Hayes

Bryce would then come up through high school where he graduated with a 4.2 GPA and was considering Ivy League schools, like Harvard and Yale, and even military academies; however, Bryce eventually decided that Rhodes College, his hometown Division III school, was the place to be. He played football there for all four years, and had initially went to school wanting to be a sports agent in the future but then found a new passion to pursue with his degree.

“So I was like, alright, I’m gonna pivot, and figure something else out. With a history major you can kind of do anything with it, because it’s gonna teach you to read well, right well, speak well, so I got that down. Got a good degree from one of the best schools in the country. And from there, it was just time to figure it out because we didn’t have a communications programs at Rhodes and there was no sports marketing. So, I had to pretty much create that avenue myself.”

Bryce Hayes

This is around the time where Bryce was beginning to get the ball rolling to kickstarting his young career covering and marketing sports.

“I started a podcast my sophomore year with our starting quarterback called ‘Can’t Knock the Hustle’. So, we started that on SoundCloud, then got it on Apple Podcast, and everything was awesome. It just kind of blew up. We had a couple episodes reach a million listeners, like people for whatever reason were attracted to it. I guess hearing the perspective of current athletes do different things, which I guess at the time that we started doing this was kind of during the wave of athlete-led podcasts.”

Bryce Hayes

This new wave is what has continued to try to push DIII sports to get more recognition than what it has received, and it’s also what led Bryce to making connections with the Memphis Grizzlies to keep moving up in the sports world.

“That was part of what kind of got us started with Can’t Knock the Hustle because we knew Division III athletics doesn’t always get the love and respect that it deserves. So I took it upon myself, me and PJ, our quarterback, and we said, alright, if nobody else is gonna do it, we’re gonna do it. Eventually we started to get a little bit of love from our local ESPN radio station, then that’s when the Grizzlies started to hype the podcast up too and that’s kind of how my connection with them began.

Bryce Hayes

Bryce nearly began producing social media content for the Memphis Grizzlies, but unfortunately COVID put a bump in the road to that initial plan. Despite this, Bryce remained patient as the pandemic began to slow down and that door with working in conjunction with an NBA organization began to become a reality once again.

“But I’m sitting at home, not doing anything and then I get that job with the local newspaper that wrote for the Grizzlies. I get the call from them and they say, ‘hey, you want to write?’ Granted, it’s not paying much…but it’s exposure. So I say, ‘sure, why not?’ I’m not doing anything, and I’m sitting at home anyways. So, I start writing about the Grizzlies, doing some social media stuff here and there with the Grizzlies, and I was already kind of helping, per se, in college, you know, lending my insight as not only an athlete and somebody from Memphis but somebody that knows basketball. So I get to do that for a couple of months.”

Bryce Hayes

During just that two month period, along with some of his later years at Rhodes prior, Bryce had made numerous relationships all around the city of Memphis. Whether it was the constant connections he built at Rhodes College that allowed him to produce content for their athletic program, or even having Ja Morant, star point guard for the Grizzlies, retweet his articles that were posted on Twitter, Bryce is forever thankful for everyone in the city that helped lead him to his next stop at TLU.

“Yeah, the city looking out for me is probably why I got the job (at TLU), to be honest. So, then I got a call from my old boss at Rhodes telling me there was an opening to be the SID here. I interviewed with Coach Miller and Ms. Jeanne, and by next week I was hired.”

Bryce Hayes

Since Bryce has been here over the last two years, he has done so much already. Numbers and engagement continue to soar for all of our sports social media accounts, and the excitement around “Too Live U” is at an all time high right now. Bryce closed out our interview saying this.

“I’ve done everything I can for this place since I’ve been here, a lot of long days and a lot of long hours. I just want to do whatever it takes to benefit our student-athletes. I just feel like that’s my obligation because we’re too talented of a campus for y’all to not get the proper exposure.”

Bryce Hayes

I hope you all enjoyed this article. Hopefully you found a new appreciation for all the hard work that is done behind the scenes to make Texas Lutheran athletics what it is thanks to the efforts from Bryce and the others that make it all possible.

Good luck to you all throughout the rest of the spring semester!

Go bulldogs and pups up!