Building a legacy. #MizzouMade.

Little did Bill Roundtree know that when he suited up for Mizzou Men’s Basketball for his freshman year in 1982-83, he would start a family legacy of donning the Black & Gold. Roundtree was a fixture on a Mizzou team that won 81 games during his four-year career, including a Big Eight championship in 1982-83. But before he was throwing lobs to Steve Stipanovich and finding a wide-open Jon Sundvold, Roundtree was blazing his own legacy in Wellsville, Mo., a small rural town 75 miles west of St. Louis.

Wellsville’s population in 2017 is listed at 1,163, and Roundtree had more than twice that many points in high school, breaking NBA star Bill Bradley’s 20-year old state record of 3,066. But despite scoring more than 3,000 points during his high-school career, Roundtree was lightly recruited until Norm Stewart and Mizzou gave him a chance.

“When you talk about Mizzou, I mean, where do you start? Roundtree said. “My experience here opened my eyes up to things that I didn’t know existed.”

At Mizzou, Roundtree was in the big city. He stepped into a Mizzou program that had established itself as one of the nation’s best, winning four consecutive Big Eight regular season titles as Stewart had the program rolling the early 1980s. The small-town kid was now playing college basketball on the largest stage there is, and his first career game was one that he will always remember.

“The first three or four ball games of the year I recall playing a team with a guy that wasn’t a bad player, his name was Michael Jordan,” Roundtree said. “We went in my freshman year and beat them.”

But it wasn’t during the ‘first three or four ball games’ that Roundtree and the Tigers squared off against the Jordan’s North Carolina Tar Heels – it was his first career Division I basketball game. Mizzou, then ranked No. 15 nationally, knocked off the third-ranked Tar Heels. That sparked a 26-8 season and a Big 8 title, Mizzou’s fourth straight. That season included two wins over Kansas. At that moment, Roundtree felt like he was a long a way from Wellsville, Mo., and he cherished every moment of it.

“I grew up in a small rural town here in Missouri and I came here really for two different reasons,” Roundtree said. “First of all academics, and of course sports. I also wanted to be a part of an athletic program that competed at a very high level.”

During his four years, Mizzou won 81 games and a Big Eight title. The team began to embody the legendary toughness of Coach Stewart. Rountree remembers that it was Stewart who shaped him the most, both as a player and as a man.

“As I reflect upon the time that I spent with Coach Stewart, he made me a better man because he made me drive, he made me work,” Roundtree said. “That translated not only on the court, but with everything that I ended up doing.”

While Roundtree was a standout on the basketball floor in college, the opportunity to pursue the game in the NBA was not in the cards for 6-1 guard. That’s when his experience at Mizzou really began to pay dividends. He used his degree, a bachelor’s of science in education in 1987, to advance up the ranks of State Farm Insurance, serving as the Area Vice President for the company in St. Louis. He is also a board member for Mizzou’s Trulaske College of Business.

“Those experiences from an academic perspective and from an athletic perspective actually was the foundation that I needed to be successful in my professional career,” Roundtree said.

Roundtree’s experiences at Mizzou had such a profound impact on him that when it came time for several members of his family to pick a college, they all chose Mizzou. His daughter, Jordan, chose to pursue a college degree while continuing her basketball career at Mizzou, under Coach Robin Pingeton, who has many of the same characteristics as former Roundtree’s mentor, Coach Stewart.

"So far, I've learned to go all-out 100 percent of the time," Jordan Roundtree said. "I've gotten bigger, faster, and stronger, and I've worked on my shot a lot. I just want to be able to make some type of impact, no matter what my role is. I just want to get more confident and be able to learn a lot from Coach (Robin) Pingeton and everyone else.”

Those are all similar lessons learned by Bill under Stewart.

And the family connections don’t stop there. Dedrick Harrington, a linebacker on Mizzou’s Football team from 2003-06, is a nephew of Bill’s. Bill also met his wife at Mizzou. So while it may seem that Bill has made it a long way from little Wellsville, Mo., his journey was undoubtedly shaped by the profound impact that Mizzou had on him during four years in Columbia.

“Mizzou made me focus. Mizzou made me hungry. Mizzou made me an individual that wanted to strive to be successful and be all that I could be. I would like to thank Mizzou and those individuals that provided me a scholarship. I am Mizzou Made.”