Tennis Coach Drew Barrett Wants You to Take His Cake

For 51 weeks a year he avoids mixing bowls, cake pans and whipped frosting. Outside of occasionally grilling, he doesn’t even cook.

But on that 52nd week, which falls in late August with the start of the school year, the call to bake overtakes. He finds himself awake at three or four in the morning, bleary-eyed, burnt out and buried in batter.

He doesn’t want to bake—he has to—and often battles last-minute stress when ambition struggles with deadline. Because as Davidson College men's head tennis coach, Barrett’s very competitive. After watching his first Cake Race 14 years ago—he wanted in.

Today, he’s mastered his game so well that he usually places as a top seed.

The Cake Race is a time-honored Davidson tradition where first-year students run a 1.7 mile course for cake. It started 80 years ago when the college’s cross-country coach didn’t have enough runners and ordered a race to recruit new talent. The winner got a cake.

Early cakes were rather pedestrian; think one or two layers, round or square, with vanilla or chocolate frosting.

Today many cakes include big, elaborate, artistic creations by bakers from Dining Services to faculty members, bakeries and local elementary school students. Many credit Barrett for elevating the level of competition and making himself a very tough act to beat.

“People go out of their way to dethrone him,” says Sandy Helfgott, Davidson’s director of physical education, recreation and wellness and official Cake Race guardian. A former Davidson resident saw Barrett’s cake one year and said, “I’m going to beat him.” She laughed about it, but it was her mission to get her cake picked before Drew’s.

“She tried for years and never did.”

Barrett usually bakes the first or second cake selected. He says gender plays a role: Each year, first choice alternates between the men’s or women’s winner. This year, men got first pick.

The men usually go for quantity—(in one case a sheet cake spanning a large piece of plywood) but women tend to focus more on quality, he said.

“The men pick the biggest cake, they just want something ginormous, but the women pick the best,” he said. “If I’m not going to do something big, I’ve got to do something great, because students love cake.”

The Cake Race is extremely popular with Davidson’s athletes because tradition has winners sharing with their teams. Some veteran athletes have been known to advise their first-year teammates: “Don’t come back without a cake."

Of course rivalries exist among different teams.

Cross country runners usually win the top few slots, and often delight in picking cakes decorated in lacrosse, soccer or tennis themes, much to the annoyance of those teams. (Payback comes when the occasional non-cross-country runner wins a top slot, which as you can imagine, doesn’t sit well with their coaches.)

Family Affair

Barrett starts his production on Sunday, bakes Monday, and puts everything together Tuesday. He figures he spends about 18 to 20 hours over three days. As usual, he has grandiose plans— (hint: Think magic, old buildings, and multiple cake pan sizes)—and if history repeats itself, he’ll be up all night.

He’s hit a few snags in his time.

The first year he got serious about baking, his goal was to have his cake make the top 15. A petite woman with the 15th pick selected his cake, tried to lift it from the table and put it down because it was too heavy.

“But I still count it as making the top 15,” Barrett said.

Another time his wife, Mandy, sat in the back seat holding the cake when Barrett slammed on the brakes to avoid a student driving the wrong way on a one-way street. The cake lurched and Mandy Barrett saved it, but it later collapsed to an early death on the display table.

His family enables his aspirations.

This article was originally published in the Fall/Winter 2022 print issue of the Davidson Journal Magazine; for more, please see the Davidson Journal section of our website.