University
After 25 years, Galaxy is making a comeback! Formed in 1947, Galaxy was a men’s social club for 50 years before self-disbanding in 1997. Five Galaxy alumni — Ken Bissell, David Underwood, Kevin Nutt, David Redding and Randy Reynolds — now serve as sponsors for the revived club.
“We’d been talking about this 75th anniversary, and we planned to have a big reunion,” Bissell said. “We thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we had the club back? If we had this reunion this fall, and all these guys came back and saw these young students wearing the Galaxy jersey?’ That’s what really drove the decision to move forward on it.”
Bissell and other Galaxy alumni had been considering bringing the club back since 2011. After receiving permission from the deans in the fall of 2021, they began to recruit.
“Our sponsors went to one of the football games last fall, had a tent set up and were trying to recruit students to join,” Galaxy President Wyatt Vanlandingham said. “Luke Phyllis was the first to sign up. He told one of his buddies, and then somehow the baseball team found out, and a bunch of them joined.”
“We’d been trying to recruit some students,” Ken said. “We had a couple of guys join us, so we thought it was going to be a slow build, but then suddenly one of those guys texted me and said, ‘What would you say if I told you we had 39?’ and it was the baseball team that had joined us.”
“There are five sponsors, and they were all in Galaxy in the past,” Vanlandingham said. “Some of them have been other club sponsors before, and they were just really passionate about bringing Galaxy back. They’re really excited now that there’s 39 of us.”
After gaining 39 new members, including 33 members of the baseball team, Galaxy elected officers and began meeting regularly. Since the club’s revival, they have held their first queening and plan to start holding activities in March or April.
David Underwood said they are keeping the same jerseys but have created a new constitution.
“Are there old traditions we’d love to see carried over?” David said. “Sure. But it’s their club, and if they don’t want to do that, we understand. But we would love some things to carry over, just out of respect and appreciation for the people who went before us. This club means a lot to a lot of people. We have told some of our old Galaxy guys that we’re starting up again and asked if they could help us, and it’s been unbelievable. People who have never given to Harding before are giving now, specifically for Galaxy, because they love the club so much.”
Underwood said that the main thing he hopes to see from Galaxy is for it to be spiritually focused. After that, what they choose to do is up to them.
“We have great trust in them,” he said. “Our trust in them keeps growing because they seem like a really good bunch of guys. We just want them to be a group of guys who enjoy being together and blessing each other.”
