As a communications major at Baylor who interned at NBC in New York, Drew Pittman didn't necessarily plan on a career in facilities and event management.

And when he got married nearly seven years ago, "if you would have told me then that we would have a blind Ukranian 14-year-old and a Ukranian 7-year-old, I would have been like, 'Are you crazy? What are you talking about?''' said Pittman, Baylor's Assistant Athletic Director for Event Management & Facilities.

But, that's exactly where Drew and his wife Alyssa are in 2018. They have adopted two boys from Ukraine, 14-year-old Oleg and 7-year-old Archer, and are waiting to see what's next in God's plan for the Pittman family.

"We feel God has put us in a unique position to be parents of Oleg and Archer," Drew said. "And He will tell us what the next place to be is. . . . What I've learned is that it's God's plan, not Drew's plan. That's a big part of it."

Even going into athletics seemed like a stretch for Drew, who admits that he "may be the most un-athletic person" in the Baylor Athletics department.

"I did Little League and stuff like that," said Drew, who grew up in Abilene and graduated from Abilene Wylie High School in 2000. "But once I got to high school, I didn't do any of that."

After working with facilities during his time at Baylor, he got a chance to do some part-time work in the fall of 2004 when he came back from New York too late to start grad school. And when Clint Musslewhite left to take a position with the Corpus Christi Hooks baseball club, Drew was officially hired in February 2005.

"For the first five or six years, I mostly did Ferrell Center stuff, and we all worked football," he said. "Probably six or seven years ago, I really started doing football more. And then for the four years at McLane Stadium, I've been the primary facilities and event management person on football."

In that role, Drew oversees the coordination of home events with "somewhere around 1,600 people" needed to staff games at McLane Stadium. That includes parking, police, EMS, fire and the SMG and CSC event staff. "Anything from trash cans, to golf carts, to police, to whatever," he said.

"I'm not saying we didn't do it well in 2013 (in the last year at Floyd Casey Stadium), but we do it better in 2017, which we should," he said. "It's grown and really turned into something that I think we're all really proud of. You see how other people do it, and we feel like we do it just as good as anybody in the country."

An added role that Drew has taken on the last two years has been helping coordinate all the football team's road trips.

"Ryan Kelly (Associate Director for Football Operations) and I go in advance," Drew said. "And our goal is take care of all the uh-ohs or things we just didn't know about before anybody gets there. So that when the plane lands in Oklahoma City or Des Moines or Manhattan, everybody gets off the plane, they get on the buses, the buses go to the hotel and it's seamless from there."

That's coincided with him taking on teaching responsibilities with grant-funded seminar classes through the University of Southern Mississippi. Over the last year, he's taught classes at Met Life Stadium in New Jersey, the University of Florida, Albuquerque, N.M., and Miami, Fla.

"They're basically for people that do what I do ÃÆ'Æ'à € 'ÃÆ'â ‚¬  ' ¢ÃƒÆ'Æ'à € ' ¢' ¬" run stadiums and law enforcement and stuff like that relative to stadium security," he said. "I enjoy that, because I get to meet new people, I get to see how they do what they do, and I get to bring back the things they do well and do it here."

Introduced by mutual friends, Drew started dating Alyssa after she graduated from Baylor in 2009 and they set their wedding date for March 5, 2011, because it was one of the scheduling "holds" that the school had submitted to the Big 12 Conference.

"I told Alyssa, 'Hey, this is the time you wanted to do it, we're not going to have a basketball game this day and it's right before the Big 12 Tournament, so teams are going to go to the Big 12 Tournament. We can go on our honeymoon, and I'll come back and do the first and second round of the women's NCAA Tournament. There's almost a two-week window.' So, we booked the venue and we got it all set up," Drew said.

One problem. That was the exact date ESPN picked to host its College GameDay program for the first time ever in Waco, with the Baylor men facing the Texas Longhorns.

When Drew met with one of the ESPN operations staffers that Friday, the day before his wedding, and suggested a restaurant in Waco, former Indiana and Texas Tech coach Bob Knight "started yelling that we're not going to go anywhere else. We're going to go eat at Buzzard Billy's. That's the best place in Waco, and I don't care what he says."

"He didn't get fiery by any Bob Knight means," Drew said. "But, he's looking right at me, and I said, 'Coach Knight, I really think you're going to enjoy this place. It's a really good place to eat.' And he says, 'Well, it better be, or I'm going to come find you.'''

Sitting within earshot, ESPN analyst Jay Bilas hears the conversation and tweets, "Bob Knight threatens arena staff member over dinner recommendation." No pressure, buddy.

"Our rehearsal dinner is in the same area as that restaurant, so I walked over and went back to the private room they had gotten and asked him, 'So, how was dinner?' And he says, 'Oh, it was great. It was fantastic. I can't believe we've never been here before.'''

On his wedding day, with the Ferrell Center doors opening at 7 a.m. for the live College GameDay show from 9 to 11, Drew comes in early to make sure everything goes off without a hitch. He puts on his tuxedo at the Ferrell Center before making the short trip to Truett Seminary, where he got married at the Paul W. Powell Chapel.

"Bobby, the guy who drives the College GameDay bus, offered to take me to the church," Drew said. "But, I told him, I wasn't sure if Alyssa would be OK with that."

The idea of adoption was actually planted much earlier, when Alyssa worked as a volunteer at an orphanage in Nicaragua the summer after she graduated from high school.

"She had always told me, 'Hey, I want to adopt kids, and I really want to adopt waiting kids, I don't want to get on a list and adopt a baby. I just want to adopt kids that are there waiting,''' Drew said.

The Pittmans started the process in 2012 and had made the first of three required visits to adopt a 3-year-old boy in Russia when their plans hit a snag.

"Because of some diplomatic stuff, Russia and the U.S. are not happy with each other at the time, and the U.S. passed a human rights law that bars a specific list of Russians from being able to have money in U.S. banks and have U.S. property," Drew said. "Russia retaliates in kind, with a similar law, but their law also says Americans can't adopt Russian kids anymore.

"To say we were crushed is a little bit of an understatement. It was a rough deal."

After basically sitting around for two or three months just waiting, "we kind of kept coming back to, 'God has a plan for us.' This is part of that plan, however good or bad it is. So, we started the process again," he said.

They had started the adoption process for a 10-year-old blind boy, Oleg, when his name also popped up for a summer hosting program.

When they picked up Oleg at the airport in Dallas for the six-week hosting program, he grabbed Alyssa by the shoulder and asked, "Do you speak English?"

"I'm thinking, 'This is fantastic!''' Drew said. "But it turns out that's the only English he knew."

After an initial visit in December, the couple returned to Ukraine in January 2014 to finish the adoption process, but ended up having to stay for 30 days because of unrest in the country and travel restrictions.

"We get it all done and come back home, and two or three days later, the Ukranian president, (Viktor) Yanukovych, has a bunch of people shot in the center of Kiev," Drew said. "And then a day or two after that, his government gets overthrown and he has to escape to Russia. Remarkably, for all of it being in the middle of a political revolution in Ukraine, we never felt like we were in danger. It just felt normal."

Although Oleg is totally blind, "it's actually the last thing you need to know about him," Drew said. "He's just a 14-year-old kid that likes to play computer games."

From the far northeastern Ukraine city of Karkiv, Oleg is also a huge fan of the musical "Hamilton," thinks it's the "greatest thing ever"; speaks Russian and Ukranian and only took a couple months to pick up English; and actually likes math and science.

In June 2016, the Pittmans added Archer to the family. Now 7, Archer is from the far southwestern Ukraine city of Izmail and is "the most excited, just happy-go-lucky 7-year-old that you've ever met," Drew said.

"He has a medical issue that makes it hard for him to put on weight, so he's had a hard time just growing, but he's still the happiest kid you've ever seen in your life. He just loves everything and everybody."

Skipping the diaper years, Drew said, "I'm sure in a lot of instances it's easier," but going from no children to adopting a 10-year-old boy is "pretty abrupt."

"There's a lot of things you feel like you have to learn really fast," he said. "We had a little bit of preparation for it because Oleg was with us for that six weeks in the summer. But, it's just totally different when he's with you full-time. I will tell you, that six weeks in the summer, I don't think we ever turned the television on.

"We used to go home and be like, 'Hey, let's watch something on Netflix or whatever.' Now, it's a completely different thing. I'm sure just having kids in general is like that. Your life changes pretty dramatically. But, it's so much fun."