Rex Huigens He is a natural-born athlete. Rex Huigens, chair of the movement and sports science program, has played basketball, baseball, football, tennis, golf, shot skeet and sporting trap, fished and … repaired antique clocks? “You don’t put an athlete and clock repair together,” he said. “I think that was the interest for me.” Many ULV professors entertain unlikely hobbies: Jerry Kernes peruses karaoke bars and sings Bob Dylan tunes, John Gingrich sang in the Los Angeles Master Chorale; Philip Tai collects tobacco pipes; Kim Martin collects dolls. And for the last 25 years, Rex Huigens has repaired and sold antique clocks. It started reluctantly. Huigens’ friends were attending a class at the Church of the Brethren and attempted to drag Huigens along, “No, I have no interest in that,” he recalled. But he went anyway. “I just kind of got into it,” said Huigens, who worked at an automobile repair shop through college. “It was so different than anything else I’ve ever done.” Getting into it, Huigens realized that clock repair presented him the opportunity to meet people other than athletes. And he was good at it. First, he bought two clocks, repaired them both and sold one to pay for the other, which he kept. Eventually, he started working for three dealers. But he got too busy. “I don’t want it to be a job,” he said. “I want it to be a hobby.” Now, he has about 17 or 18 around his house and about 30 that he wants to sell, said Huigens, who actually also attended a macrame class with his wife at the Church of the Brethren. “I see, when I retire, doing that a little more for a little spending cash,” he said. As for the rest of his life, including his livelihood, that generally funnels back to athletics, but it wasn’t always that way. Huigens actually thought he was going to be a math major, until his senior year in high school when a few teachers turned him off to it. “I said, ‘Well, if that’s what a mathematics major is, I don’t want to be it,’” he recalled. But in retrospect, given his love for activity and fascination with the human body, Huigens always knew his calling. It’s even in his blood: His dad coached. “I’ve known I wanted to teach and coach since I was 6,” he said. Now, Huigens’ spare time is filled with sporting. He plays tennis 2-3 mornings a week, in addition to playing at least nine holes with his golf team during the season and recreational rounds in the summer and fall. (A recent shoulder injury slightly curbed his ability to play more). On the weekends in the fall, he generally takes in ULV football games. Until he was 45, he also played in full-court basketball leagues. And when not hunting birds, or shooting skeet or sporting trap, he also casts his hand at fly fishing – when possible – at his Idaho cabin. “If you don’t do something, you just sit,” said the three-sport collegiate athlete. “I’d rather do something than sit.” But despite his cosmopolitan athletic interests, Huigens laments that athletes as well-rounded as he are fading. “I think it’s a shame that we make kids specialize in high school,” he said. “I think we have poorer athletes. It’s a result of all the specialization they’ve had.” And this specialization is a byproduct of the downward spiral of athletics into focusing solely on the bottom line: winning. “But that’s always the way it’s been,” he said. “There’s something about athletics. It’s emotional. It gets people aroused. The real value isn’t winning. The real value is trying to win. We’ve made it winning. It’s like if you don’t win, there’s no value. The value is actually everything but.” THE PROFESSOR As an athlete, Huigens admires work ethic probably more than anything else in his students: “I have all the time in the world for the student that sincerely wants to try,” he said. In addition, his view on the well-roundedness of athletes transfer over into the classroom, admitting to enjoying students that have varied interests and extracurricular activities. And they have to be able to laugh: “Laughter is a good medicine,” he said. “Almost everything you do, there can be something funny in it. We have to be able to laugh. Sometimes, we take ourselves too seriously.” As a teacher, Huigens attempts to relate the material to his students and their lives: “I try to put it in their terms,” he said. “I try to make it as relevant as possible.” But most of all, Huigens just wants to do the best he can, to play the game to the best of his ability: “All I’m trying to do is make whatever I’m doing better than it was before. And sometimes you can’t always do that, but you can at least try. I can never be a Roland Ortmayer. Ort was Ort. But there are some ways I could be better than Ort. I think part of any athlete is you want to be better. I think that’s a positive trait. It’s part of my nature. I don’t want to lose. I can handle it, but it doesn’t mean I like it.” RETURN TO FACULTY LISTmailto:huigensr@ulv.edu?subject=HELLOHome.htmlshapeimage_1_link_1
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