Hidden Talent: Hayden Clines
By Sam Selle
Hayden Clines
Position: Head Coach
Team: University of Texas San Antonio
The rise of UTSA as a competitive collegiate quidditch team has been the focus of many narratives this past season, and rightfully so. They went from barely being on the map to ranked second on the Eighth Man media rankings in the span of a single season. Which is what makes Hayden’s story so interesting. Hayden is the main reason UTSA even had a team this past season. He took a team of 5 players and recruited until they had a team of 24 elite athletes to teach quidditch!
In his own words, Hayden is a very intense and competitive person who’s played sports most of his life. When playing, his goal was to be the best and he pushed himself as hard as he could to reach that goal. He started playing quidditch when he was 15 years old at his hometown church. That last part sounds crazy, but it’s true. After graduating from UT Austin, Hank Dugie brought quidditch back home with him and taught his church friends how to play, Hayden among them. Since then, Hayden has gone on to play for League City Legend in their inaugural season, founded the first high school quidditch team with Angela Hembre (League City Heroes), and lead the recruitment of the current UTSA team.
Hayden joined UTSA Quidditch Club his freshman year already with several years of quidditch experience. However, his first season on the team was a rough one. They had 9-14 players at most tournaments which led to a lot of losses against teams they felt they could otherwise beat if they had more subs. Part way through the season, Hayden suffered an extremely bad concussion that prevented him from playing for the rest of the season. Despite these struggles, he stuck with the team and when nationals came around they had high hopes. Those high hopes were dashed rather quickly when 5 of their 14 players got injured on the first day and, during their match against Maryland, both their non-playing coach, Miguel Esparza, and Daniel Williams were red carded out of the game. The next day they lost their first bracket match and then stayed to watch Texas Hill Country Heat (who had a lot of UTSA players on their roster) only to see them get beaten by Texas Calvary. UTSA ended the season demoralized by nationals with only 5 players planning on returning, Daniel Williams not among them.
The previous season ended with Hayden being appointed head coach by Williams and Esparza. Yet over the summer, he decided to not play due to repeated concussions. Despite this, he took his leadership role seriously and decided to put in the work, reaching out to Carlos Pardo, who became the team president. Hayden had lofty goals for the season; he wanted to win the next nationals. This sounds crazy considering they were starting mostly from scratch, so Hayden made recruitment his priority. During the first couple weeks of school, he spent ~10 hours a day recruiting athletes to come play a full-contact co-ed sport (he didn’t even mention it was called quidditch until later). His work paid off; they came out of recruitment with roughly 500 phone numbers of interested students! But the real moment he realized it had worked was at tryouts.
They had 70-80 people come out, many of them athletes who loved to compete and had been playing sports most of their lives. These impressive tryouts also caused other UTSA players to return to the team, most notably Daniel Williams. The sheer number of players even caused UTSA leadership to discuss the possibility of a second or even third team. In the end, they decided to focus on a single team. Part way into the season, Hayden ended up trading his position as head coach to assistant coach while Williams took the role of head coach. UTSA went on to win their first regional title, beating out the reigning champion Texas Quidditch, and was poised to make a run for the collegiate national title before COVID hit.
Where is he now: After going all out recruiting and coaching this past season, Hayden decided to take a step back from quidditch for the time being. Not being able to play due to repeated concussions was hard for him given how much he loves to be on the pitch himself. However, it's important to remember that Hayden has been playing since he was in high school, and thus has had a fairly long quidditch career despite still being in college. He's leaving behind a talented and dedicated UTSA team that will be a contender for nationals. The foundation Hayden built carries on.
