At Texas Christian, all sports ride football’s coattails

Texas Christian University loves to court the local oil and natural gas barons whose pockets are deeper than most of the wells from which their immense wealth has been drawn.

And when those barons debate whether to donate pocket change — a few million dollars or so — to the roughly 8,700-student private school, Texas Christian sends in its closer: Gary Patterson.

Chris Del Conte, athletic director at Texas Christian, even calls the school’s football coach “Dennis Eckersley,” referring to the right-handed reliever who is in baseball’s Hall of Fame.

Patterson, a fireball on the sidelines, has some Midwestern grit about him, which helps when he slips on a sports coat and saunters into a room of fancy finger foods, old scotch and even older money.

With his blunt honesty and impressive resume — a 97-28 record in 10 seasons as coach, plus consecutive undefeated regular seasons and Bowl Championship Series berths — the affable Patterson usually leaves them signing checks.

“One hundred and thirty million dollars raised since February,” Del Conte said. And many of the new donors aren’t even alumni of the university.

It hasn’t been easy. Patterson calls fundraising the “coolest thing that wore me out,” but his work and his team’s success have helped propel Texas Christian sports teams to new levels as they’ve cashed in on the celebrity and donations propelled by the football program.

“There’s a lot to be said for momentum,” said baseball coach Jim Schlossnagle, who took Texas Christian to within one game of the national championship series last season, its only College World Series losses coming to eventual runner-up UCLA.

Momentum indeed:

•Texas Christian and Florida were the only schools last season to play in a BCS game, reach the College World Series and win a national championship in another sport. (Texas Christian won the NCAA title in the coed sport of rifle, becoming the first all-female squad to do so.)

•Fifteen of Texas Christian’s 20 sports teams advanced to postseason play last season and won a school-record six conference titles in baseball, women’s basketball, football, men’s swimming and diving, men’s tennis and women’s tennis.

•Patterson won nine national coach-of-the-year honors in 2009, and Schlossnagle won a similar honor for baseball in 2010.

•Several campus construction projects — athletic and academic — are underway, highlighted by a $105-million renovation to Amon G. Carter Stadium, where Patterson’s team plays, that is scheduled to be completed in 2012.

Also coming in 2012 is Texas Christian’s move to the Big East Conference, which carries irony considering that the university is in a city known as “Where the West Begins” — more than 1,500 miles from Big East headquarters in Providence, R.I.

What makes the travel worth it is that the Big East offers automatic qualification status for BCS bowl games and rich television contracts, guaranteeing the Horned Frogs will be exposed to millions of additional spectators. (Nine of the nation’s top 35 markets reside in Big East territory.) The Big East pursued Texas Christian largely for its football program, but all of the school’s sports will join the conference.

“Whether it’s dating or whatever, everybody wants to be wanted,” Patterson said, “so to know that we’ve finally put a product out there that somebody else would want is pretty gratifying.”

The mayor of Fort Worth declared each Friday “Purple Day,” when city employees wear the school’s colors. And students are pouring applications into the school — more than 18,000 for 1,600 freshman spots last year — Schlossnagle said.

School officials credit football and Patterson.

“His impact has been immeasurable,” Chancellor Victor Boschini said. “He’s infiltrated himself — not trying to do that, but through his actions — in every area of the university and every area of the community too.”

The school’s endowment was $974 million in 2009 — 58th-most among U.S. and Canadian institutions, according to the National Assn. of College and University Business Officers — and Patterson genuinely seems to enjoy his role in filling the coffers.

“I just know it’s made people happy,” said Patterson, who lives only a few blocks from campus. “To watch people in Fort Worth, for so long they thought of us as a second-class university. Now, to see how happy people are, that gives me more satisfaction than winning.”

baxter.holmes@latimes.com