Texas Agriculture Daily

By Jennifer Dorsett
Field Editor

On a gray morning in rural East Texas, the overcast sky promises rain. Cagan Baldree stands on the back porch, surveying the green, rolling pasture and pine trees beyond.

“The property we’re on is where I was raised. My family roots run very, very deep right here in this spot,” he said.

Cagan’s dad, Cody, was raised in the same house. Cagan’s grandmother still lives on the property a short half mile away.

Cody transitioned out of the dairy business into growing hay and raising beef cattle in the early ’90s. He married Shannon Pennington in 1996, and together they had Cagan, Callahan and Caroline.

Cagan has fond memories of helping his dad and playing with his siblings on the farm.

“We did everything together—just riding around with my dad, feeding the dogs, feeding the cattle, riding on the tractor with him while he cut hay,” he said. “We still had the dairy barn up here. It wasn’t in use, but me and my brother loved to go play in there, because there was so much to climb on and check out. We were always fishing and hunting on the back of the place.”

Although life as a farm kid was busy, there was time for sports, too.

Cody coached Cagan’s and Callahan’s baseball teams throughout their childhood, and he taught his kids to approach sports the same way they approached tasks on the farm.

“He instilled in us what is most important—like why it’s important to take care of your own stuff and to take responsibility for what you’ve been blessed with,” Cagan said.

In 2008, when Cagan was 10 years old, the family found out Cody had leukemia.

A two-year battle followed. Cagan’s dad would go into remission only to have the cancer come back in another area.

Still, in 2010, things seemed better. But then the Baldrees received another devastating blow.

Cody had a cancerous mass on the lining of his brain, a particularly difficult area to treat. As a result of an invasive chemotherapy treatment, he became paralyzed from the waist down and lost the use of his legs.

“Cody went from being my kids’ hero and just this larger-than-life personality to in a wheelchair almost overnight,” Shannon said. “But Cagan became his daddy’s legs. He did the things Cody couldn’t do, like hooking up the tractor, helping him get in and out of it. He took on so much responsibility at such a young age.”

The situation weighed on Cagan sometimes, but he would gladly do whatever it took to help his dad.

Cody lost his fight with leukemia in 2014, but not before watching Cagan and the rest of the Carthage Bulldogs take home the Texas 3A Division 1 high school football championship in December 2013.

“It was definitely God’s timing that the last football game of mine he saw was that one,” Cagan said. “I remember it wasn’t something he necessarily liked or wanted, but because he was in his wheelchair at the time, he got really good seats because of where he was supposed to sit. I remember looking up to him in the crowd throughout the game and after the game. Being able to see him right there close was special.”

After Cody passed away, Cagan pitched in around the house, worked on the property and chauffeured his younger brother and sister to after-school activities, all while maintaining his own academic and athletic schedule.

“At that point, Cagan truly became the man of the house,” Shannon said. “He just stepped up, and he was really a godsend to me. I couldn’t have gotten through it without him.”

When Cagan graduated high school in 2016 as salutatorian of his class, he was at a crossroads.

He had always loved baseball, but football seemed a better fit for the 6’4” athlete. There were football scholarship offers on the table from smaller schools, but Cagan’s dream was to attend Texas A&M University.

“I told my head coach ‘I’m just going to go to A&M. That’s where I’ve always wanted to go, and because the education part of it is a lot more important to me right now, that’s kind of the plan,’” Cagan said.

Cagan’s coach suggested he try to walk on to the football team.

So, he did. After receiving preferred walk-on status, Cagan played center and guard for three seasons. While he was happy to be at his favorite school and on the football roster, it just wasn’t enough.

“When I got in, I was already undersized to begin with, so I was always constantly trying to train, eat as much as I possibly could, gain as much weight as I possibly could. But I never really could get over that threshold,” Cagan said.

But that hard-earned farm kid grit and determination carried Cagan to a breakthrough.

Things began to fall into place when, in 2017, Texas A&M hired head coach Jimbo Fisher. During the 2018 season, Fisher reintroduced the position of fullback to the Aggie offensive line formation.

“A little over a year ago, I knew this was kind of the last shot of it happening,” Cagan said. “I really wanted to get on the field. I knew I had worked very hard and just wanted that one shot in a position that would fit my skill set a little more.”

He approached Fisher in January 2019 about playing fullback in the fall.

“The thing you don’t realize about him is he can catch the football,” Fisher told the Houston Chronicle in an interview last year. “He said, ‘I can catch, coach,’ and I said, ‘All linemen say they can catch, because they want the ball.’ Then we put him in there, and he can catch the ball very well.”

In true Baldree fashion, Cagan trained hard and earned the position, getting leaner, faster and stronger.

He played all 12 games last season. Now, in his final season playing for Texas A&M, Cagan is the starting fullback.

But due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, it wasn’t even certain there would be a football season this year.

“COVID-19 affected me just like everyone else. It added some stress for my wife and I when we were planning our wedding, which took place July 11, but it went off without a hitch, just with limited capacity,” he said. “Then, of course, our football season was delayed until Sept. 26, but we weren’t even sure it would happen at all at first.”

Cagan plans to keep training hard, playing hard and studying hard to reach his goals. But without his agricultural background, Cagan said his success could have never happened.

“It goes back to the way my dad raised us, that there’s a blessing in work,” Cagan said. “Whatever the situation was, we’d take the same mentality, mindset, discipline, hard work and attention to detail in anything that we do—whether that be working here on the place or with sports. If you just let things go, it’s not going to look like something you want to take hold of, and that’s the same thing with a football career. I need to take care of my own body. I need to take care of training and making sure that I’m prepared to do what I need to do.”

No matter where football or life takes him in the future, Cagan’s roots are firmly planted. And they’ll always bring him home again.

“My brother and my sister and I were my dad’s pride and joy,” Cagan said. “But this land and where our roots are set is also so foundational to who we are as a family. We’ll always make sure that this place is cherished and taken care of and appreciated for what it is and what it’s meant to us. It’s just an amazing testament to how we’ve been blessed as a family to lean on each other when things are tough. God strengthened us through that. It’s not always a happy story, but there’s so much depth there.”