Photo of Drea Gibson courtesy of UMHB Athletics
BELTON — The seed was planted some time before Drea Gibson considered it to be an actual possibility.
Her speed and endurance as a distance runner were unquestioned. She could outrun many of the privates in her company in the U.S. Army, serving as a First Sergeant with nearly 20 years of military service and five combat tours under her belt. She had run through it all; through the hardship of loss, both personal and professional, through the stress of deployments and uncertainty. Military life can be difficult and unforgiving, yet through running, along with her strong faith and family, Gibson had become a tenacious and resilient athlete, both necessary characteristics for a great cross country competitor.
And that’s what several of her fellow soldiers were encouraging her to do, perhaps half-serious and half-joking, as she prepared to retire from the Army. She knew she would be going back to school, with the intention of earning a degree to coach high school cross country in a few years time. But running college cross country? That seemed to be a different path entirely than the one she had planned on.
“During those conversations where you’re running for training, there are a lot of conversations that you have,” Gibson said. “One of them planted the seed and said, ‘Oh you could go to college and you’d be running with the best of them.’”
She began to seriously consider it, knowing that if she stuck to a training plan and challenged herself, running at the college level as a 20-year military veteran was certainly attainable. But it wasn’t solidified until one cold January morning, when she pulled on her running shoes and headed out for a run.
Within the rhythmic pattern of her feet as she runs, Gibson sees running as more than a passion or athletic endeavor. To the UMHB freshman, it’s a way to glorify God, and while she runs, she uses the time to pray and listen to worship music. And on that particular January day, the Lord gave her a clear picture. She saw herself running with a team, something she hadn’t done since high school. Her passion for distance running during her Army service had mostly been an individual endeavor, one that helped her escape the trauma of the less-than-pleasant memories experienced over the course of plenty of hardship both at home and abroad. Running provided peace through the chaos, a consistent source of positive exhilaration in what can sometimes be a tumultuous, challenging life in the service of one’s country. Through the miles she had put in over several years, Gibson had continued to get faster, building speed and stamina.
But she had done it alone, for the most part. Running is, after all, an individual sport in the most basic sense. But within the sport of cross country, it’s not so simple. Runners compete for individual placement, but it’s that individual placement that determines a team’s overall score. The top five runners count towards the score, with the lowest team score taking the win. While she had considered what running in college could look like before, she had never seriously researched it as a legitimate option. Looking back, she admits she wasn’t even sure how the process worked, or if there were rules in place for a retired soldier competing in NCAA athletics. But she felt the Lord’s pull on her heart. And she trusted His call, even though it all seemed a little unique.
The idea of her running collegiately gained roots that morning. Through prayer, the vision only became more clear.
“After that run, I went into work, and before I even pulled up my to-do list, I sat down and googled “NCAA”,” Gibson recalled. “I just hit enter because I didn’t really know what I was looking for.”
There was precedent when it came to a soldier competing collegiately after retirement from the military. Her husband, Jeremiah, remembered hearing of Nate Boyer, a U.S. Army Green Beret who walked onto the Texas football team after six years of service in Iran and Afghanistan. It could be done, he said, and encouraged her to pursue it further. “I think you could really do it if you wanted to,” he told Gibson as she shared with him the vision from her morning run.
So she set out to establish an understanding of what it would look like. Her plan had been to take online classes and complete her degree that way, so she had no idea of which institutions in the area even had cross country teams. But before that thought could even enter the picture, her google search prompted a further look into the NCAA’s compliance policies.
“I called the NCAA,” Gibson remembers, “and the lady there told me, ‘It’s very clear cut. You have full eligibility to run.’”
But she needed a program to run for. She started researching schools within an adequate proximity to her home in Central Texas, and looking into their cross country programs. UMHB rose to the forefront, along with Baylor. Despite being a relatively new program in Division III cross country, started by current head coach Alex Aldaco in 2018, the UMHB women won the 2020 ASC championship and finished 16th at the NCAA West Regionals in 2023. It seemed like the perfect opportunity for Gibson to push herself as a runner, and integrate herself as part of the team from Day 1, something that can be tougher to do at a larger program like Baylor.
“I started talking to the running community and runners at both programs,” Gibson said. “There was an overwhelming love for UMHB’s coach, with how he coaches and how he trains his athletes. It was very easy to make a decision at that point.”
It wasn’t only the running aspect, either, that convinced Gibson to make her way to Belton. If she was going to change her post-military college plans entirely, she needed to find an institution—not just a cross country program—that proved the right fit. What she was aiming to do wouldn’t be easy, but it would be made easier with positive people around her. Through conversations with several military colleagues who had connections to UMHB, Gibson only felt more convinced that UMHB was where she needed to be.
“In the military community, there were a lot of people who knew several of the professors at UMHB through small groups at church or working with them professionally,” Gibson added. “Every person I encountered only had positive things to say about the university.”
There was still that big piece of it all that lingered, even after becoming aware that she was, in fact, eligible to compete in college athletics after a 20-year military career. She had spoken with UMHB compliance officer Rachel Acosta at the recommendation of the NCAA rep, gaining a better understanding of the process needed to compete at UMHB in the coming fall. But she still needed Aldaco’s approval to actually walk-on with the program.
It was the pivotal point in Gibson’s journey to the UMHB program when Aldaco, who had learned of her interest in running for The Cru, gave her a call. He hadn’t recruited Gibson out of high school like the vast majority of his freshman runners, and had never seen her run.
“This is an unusual situation so I had my doubts,” Aldaco said, looking back. “I asked to meet with Drea so I could get a sense of what she wanted to accomplish and see if it was even possible to adapt my training principles to her situation.
“I really liked that her motivation was to coach youth and she had a solid endurance background. The biggest reservation I had was how she would fit into the team. Team chemistry is very important to me. I did not want it to become a distraction on what as a team we were trying to accomplish.”
But he was open to the idea, and from Gibson’s perspective, it seemed much of the hesitancy faded when she told him her current times, which were on par with what he was looking for in his high school recruits.
But that wasn’t Gibson’s biggest takeaway from the conversation. It was a little while later, when he asked a question that stuck with her long after the call ended.
“It was a good question too,” Gibson remembers. “He said something to the effect of, ‘If I let you on the team, how do I know that you’re not going to quit?’ His point being that, if I’m going to invest all this time to let you onto this team, I want you to be an asset to the girls you’re running with. At least, that’s how I interpreted it. It was a very fair question.”
From Gibson’s perspective, it wasn’t Aldaco questioning her commitment. It was more an aim at understanding the drive in her dream to run collegiately, something few have done after a 20-year military career. The amount of time required would be immense, and doing that on top of having a family and taking college courses would certainly be a challenge. But Gibson was no stranger to adversity and hurdles in her path. She assured Aldaco that she was committed to not only improving her own distance running capability, but helping push her teammates as well.
It didn’t take long for that commitment to be tested.
“The first Saturday practice we had was a full day, and my daughter had a soccer game that afternoon,” Gibson said in an interview last fall. “And I had to miss her game. Retiring from the Army, one of the things I really wanted to do was be part of my family again. I felt like I missed that for 20 years. I want to be the soccer mom, the cheer mom, whatever it is. I want to be that for my children. And I understood that for this season, I’d be sacrificing that. That first weekend, I thought about that question that Coach had asked me. Mentally, it was a challenge, but I knew that I had signed up for that.”
Her family was right alongside her through every step of her first college season with The Cru. They were at the finish line in Georgetown on the last Friday of August as she fought her way to the finish line, running with UMHB across her chest for the first time. In that 5K race, the Stormy Seas Opener, Gibson placed 25th by the slimmest of margins, getting just across the line ahead of former Southwestern standout Rachel Chiella. Amongst the field of 83 runners was the University of Texas and Prairie View A&M, both Division I scholarship programs. And Gibson beat runners from both UT and PVAMU to the finish line as her husband and oldest son, Andrew, cheered her on.
“It was unreal,” Gibson said later. “It was amazing to hear my husband’s voice yell out to me while I was running past him. And my son recorded me finishing, and you can hear him saying, ‘That’s my mom!’ You can always just hope for your children, and I hope that seeing me do this inspires them to follow whatever the Lord has in store for them. I’m doing this for the Lord, but it’s also for them.”
Talk with Gibson for even a short amount of time and you’ll see how important her faith is in her life. It’s evident through the joy she exudes when thinking back on the wild journey that has gotten her to this point. Her life has taken many twists and turns, and with a reflective point of view, she traces the Lord’s plan back to her youth. As an elementary schooler, she fell one day in a freak accident, hitting the ground with several of her friends around her. Her mind told her to get back up, she didn’t want to be embarrassed any more than she already was. But she couldn’t move her hand. It seemed stuck in place. It was in fact, paralyzed. At the hospital later on, nothing had changed. She didn’t know it, but in a room next door, several members of the church were there praying for her. Her dad walked into the room at some point to check on her.
“He said, ‘I love you,’ and I reached for his hand, ” Gibson remembers, talking about her faith journey. “The paralysis was gone. At that point, I knew [God’s power was real].”
By the time she reached her senior year of high school, she already knew what her next step would be. Gibson was a multi-sport athlete at Perry High School, competing in soccer, gymnastics, cheerleading, and track, but while she was there, the unthinkable tragedy of the 9/11 terrorist attacks rattled the U.S. to its core. “I made the decision, even before my senior year started, that I was going to serve my country,” she says.
She did so valiantly, eventually earning a Combat Action badge and several other honors over the next two decades. She went on combat tours to Iraq twice, Afghanistan twice, and once to Ukraine, seeing things that put the pressures of running and day-to-day life into perspective. It’s an emotional experience for her to think back on all that she went through, but she also recognizes the power of the Lord to have gotten her through all of it and have come out on the other side.
“I feel like I’m walking in a thousand of His blessings,” Gibson said last fall. “There is something to be said for how the Lord has worked in my life. Because I know, having lived it, there is no logical or reasonable explanation that I am able to run today. I can’t tell you how many rockets missed me. I can’t tell you how many bullets flew past me. And I’m still here. It doesn’t make sense. I know it doesn’t make sense to me. And I don’t expect other people to understand it. But I know, because He’s given me so many chances to keep living, the only explanation is that I’m running for him. When I run, I feel like He’s with me.”
One of her greatest joys in her first season running with UMHB was the experience of training and competing alongside teammates that shared the same strong relationship with Christ, an aspect that only enhanced the experience, and made it feel that much more like a team. Like her team.
They’ve taught her trivial things, like how to use social media and the popular catchphrases of their younger generation, but it’s gone far behind that in the bond that has been formed. Despite the age difference, Gibson says she’s learned plenty from her younger teammates, including the ways in which they each individually navigate through difficult workouts and the arduous grind of a college student-athlete.
“I feel like I’m looking at it all from an outside perspective, having done so much and then coming back to college,” Gibson notes. “Watching each of the girls and how they handle the workouts and encourage their teammates, it quite literally sets the tone for the practice. Watching the dynamics in that sense has been insightful. Especially because I want to coach a team.”
The desire to coach in the near future shapes the way she looks at the entire experience. It takes plenty of mental fortitude to just get through a tough workout, but all the while, she’s aiming to keep precise notes in her head about the why behind what she’s doing. It’ll help her relate to her future runners better, and she knows she’ll gain insight into what makes a runner faster by learning it herself. She pays close attention to the way in which Aldaco coaches his athletes, asking him plenty of questions along the way. For as much as she hopes this experience makes her a better runner, she is well aware of the value in getting to be part of a team before she actually coaches one of her own.
That’s not to say she’s new to coaching, though. Numerous soldiers made strides in their running and physical fitness tests with Gibson’s help, giving way to her interest in making coaching a future career.
“Once I was able to help them or offer some advice,” Gibson remembers, “they would come back and say ‘Hey, I did this and this is what happened.’ Or they would celebrate, ‘I did an extra so many reps on my test or I ran this time.’ There was so much joy behind reaching their goals, whatever it was. Watching their faces light up was so rewarding.”
Coaching a team of her own continues to be the ultimate goal. It’s that passion for helping others achieve their own personal records and dreams that has driven Gibson’s desire to be the best coach she possibly can, and her time running at UMHB is only aiding in that.
Her freshman season in 2024 was one of both milestones and setbacks. Gibson suffered an injury early in the season, but was undeterred. She rehabbed as the fall went on, continuing to remain dedicated and connected with her teammates, even as her training plan looked different.
“To her credit she kept on her rehabilitation and would get here every morning to socialize with the team before she would do her indoor cardio work,” Aldaco noted. “The initial plan was for her not to run the rest of the season, but she was working so hard in her rehab, and I think the team was impressed by her dedication.”
She eventually worked her way back into the lineup, running at both the American Southwest Conference Championships and the NCAA D-III West Regionals. And at the conference championships, underneath a gray East Texas sky, UMHB claimed its second title since the program’s restart in 2018 with Gibson placing 17th in the field.
“We have a great tradition of peaking at the conference championship, so I wanted her to be with the team as we did our championship build up,” Aldaco added. “That experience will be invaluable for her as she becomes a coach in the future.”
And fittingly, it was Gibson who earned the ASC’s Newcomer of the Year award when the conference’s postseason accolades were released after the meet. She didn’t expect the award, but her dedication, passion, and contributions to UMHB’s program were unquestioned throughout her first season in the program. Those around her took note.
“Despite the challenges I faced this year, I know the Lord was with me at each turn,” Gibson said late in 2024. “I give Him all the credit for allowing me to run and finish the race. I’m so grateful for my team and Coach Aldaco. And I look forward to returning next year, a little bit wiser and stronger.”
Gibson and the UMHB women’s cross country team will make their season debut on Saturday at the Stormy Seas Opener in Georgetown, Texas. The women’s 5K race is set for 8:40 a.m., following the men’s 5K at 8 a.m. on Southwestern University’s campus.
Editor’s note: A version of this feature was published in the UMHB LIFE magazine in May 2025. You can read that story here.
