Baylor coach Nicki Collen was driving home after an assistant’s birthday celebration when she heard something strange coming from her car.
It sounded like a kitten meowing.
At first, Collen thought she might be imagining it. She did not own a cat, and there was no obvious reason a tiny meow would be coming from somewhere inside or around her vehicle. Still, the sound continued, and she knew she had to check.
When she got home, she asked her son Connor to listen. He heard it too.
Together, they searched the car until Connor removed the front driver’s side wheel. Hidden behind the fender cap was a tiny kitten, only about four weeks old.
The little cat had somehow ended up trapped in the car, crying for help from a place where no one could easily see him. If Collen had ignored the sound, the kitten’s situation could have become dangerous very quickly.
Collen said she tried to return the kitten because she knew who the mother cat was, but the mother would not take him back. At that point, Collen’s instincts took over.
She decided the kitten would not be left behind, and she would not take him to a shelter.
With help from her niece, who is a vet tech, Collen learned what the tiny cat needed. That same night, she went to Walmart to buy kitten replacement milk, then stopped at CVS for syringes so she could feed him properly.
The kitten was later named Sailor, a nod to the old Baylor Bears logo.
It did not take long for the family to fall in love. Collen’s daughter came over to help feed him, her son liked him, and the family’s labradoodle, Scout, suddenly had a new little companion in the house.
Collen said she had heard of the “cat distribution system,” the online joke about cats mysteriously appearing in people’s lives when they are meant to. Her children had a simpler explanation:
the cat chose her.
What began as a strange meow on a drive home became the start of Sailor’s new life — not trapped behind a car wheel, not crying in the dark, but safe, fed, and surrounded by a family that chose to keep him.
