THE NEW GENDER DIVIDE Small Colleges, Short of Men, Embrace Football
By BILL PENNINGTON WINCHESTER, Va. — Kevin Bosworth’s football career here at Shenandoah University amounted to all of 10 plays, across four years otherwise spent watching from the sidelines. No matter. A reedy tight end, Mr. Bosworth wanted to play football, and the college was starting a team. “As a new team, I figured they wouldn’t cut anyone,” he said. “I didn’t know that much about Shenandoah, but I knew I wanted to go there.” Some small American colleges, eager to attract men to increasingly female campuses, have taken notice of how many students like Mr. Bosworth can be lured to attend by adding football teams. Officials at these colleges say football can bring in more tuition-paying students than any other course or activity — and not just players themselves. “When you recruit a halfback, you get a few of his male friends, maybe his sister and his sister’s boyfriend, too,” said JoAnne Boyle, president of Seton Hill University. A 123-year-old former women’s institution in Greensburg, Pa., Seton Hill added football last year. “I could have started a spiffy new major of study, spent a lot of money on lab equipment and hired a few new high-powered professors,” Dr. Boyle said. “I might have gotten 25 more students for that. And I couldn’t have counted on that major still being popular in 15 years. “Instead, I started a football team, brought in hundreds of paying students, added a vibrant piece to our campus life and broadened our recognition factor. And in the long history of American higher education, one thing you can count on is football’s longevity. Football is here to stay.” Last year’s freshman class at Seton Hill was the first with more men than women. Four years ago, when the college became fully co-ed, its undergraduate student body was 18 percent male; last fall it was 41 percent male. At a time when the image of major college football has been sullied by academic, recruiting and sexual violence scandals — and as some prominent colleges eliminate football to cope with federal gender equity regulations for athletics — many smaller institutions have embraced the sport. Since their football players generally do not receive scholarships and are not blue-chip recruits, officials at small colleges say the players tend to exhibit less of a sense of entitlement, leading to fewer academic and discipline problems. In the last 10 years, nearly 50 colleges and universities have instituted or re-instituted football, with more than 80 percent in the small college ranks. In the same period, about 25 institutions have dropped football, the majority being scholarship-driven teams from the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s top tier, Division I. Shenandoah, a campus of 1,500 students in Virginia’s northernmost hill country, added football in 2000 when Mr. Bosworth was a senior in high school outside Washington. That fall, he was one of 115 young men at the first day of football practice. Shenandoah was playing in Division III, in which athletic scholarships are prohibited. Six years later, Shenandoah still has a football roster of roughly 100, most of them paying nearly full tuition of more than $26,000 a year, including room and board. It has built three new residence halls since adding football, and campus life has been energized with the spectacle of 5,000 fans in the new, corporate-sponsored stadium. Most important to Shenandoah officials, the team has narrowed the gender gap; the undergraduate enrollment is 41 percent male, up from 35 percent before football. “You would be hard pressed to find five admissions officers or five professors or five marketing experts that could guarantee you 100 new, paying male students in one year,” said Shenandoah’s athletic director, John Hill. “But you can hire five football coaches and they can do it. In fact, they can find you 200 if you want. Those boys just want to play.” Dr. James A. Davis, now in his 25th year as Shenandoah’s president, said: “I said no to football for 15 years, but I was wrong. Football is the best draw of qualified male applicants that there is anywhere. I am shocked more schools aren’t adding football.” Football is popular among small colleges because the start-up costs for a nonscholarship program are less than $1 million, and that money can usually be raised from alumni. The annual football budget is subsidized by increased tuition revenue flowing from teams of at least 100 players. Methodist College in Fayetteville, N.C., routinely has 130 to 165 players. A typical Division I roster is 95 players. Adding Diversity Officials at small colleges say that adding football raises campus morale and alumni contributions and gives an institution exposure in local or statewide media. But the biggest attraction remains football’s ability to bring in male applicants. “When male students, even nonathletes, are making a choice on which college to attend, we’ve proven that having a football team will make more of them choose you,” said Dr. Jerry G. Bawcom, president of the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in the central Texas city of Belton, 140 miles south of Dallas. In 1997, the year before Mary Hardin-Baylor instituted football, the student body was 32 percent male. The next year, male applications jumped 148 percent. Last year, the university was 40 percent male. “Before 1998, we had little luck getting kids from the big high schools around Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston or San Antonio,” Dr. Bawcom said. “Then we got some football players from those areas, and we won our share of football games. Now we go to those Dallas-Fort Worth schools and the kids know us. They’ve come in bunches. We’ve doubled the number of students living on campus.” Dr. Bawcom expected 65 football players during the first season; 210 showed up. Football also attracts African-Americans, helping many colleges with diversity. Five historically black colleges have recently started football, too. What makes football such a magnet for male students? Sheer numbers, for one thing. According to the National Federation of State High School Associations, slightly more than 1 million high school students played football in 2005. A study that Shenandoah commissioned before starting football estimated that fewer than 2 percent of the high school players in Virginia would go on to play in college even though more than half said they would like to play. “We’re keeping the dream alive for a lot of these kids,” said Paul Barnes, the Shenandoah coach. The level of play at small colleges varies broadly, in part, because there are hundreds more small college teams than major college teams. Small colleges cast a wide net, with some taking in players who were substitutes in high school and others focusing on all-conference caliber players who are a bit too small or a step too slow to attract major college recruiters. Most teams are a mix of both types of talent. College administrators said football programs also attracted students interested in ancillary activities, like bands and cheerleading, or fields of study like athletic training and sports journalism. Sometimes, the allure is more primal. “Heck, guys who play football just like to hit somebody, and the guys not playing like to watch the guys who are hitting each other,” said Trey Kern, who was raised in Winchester near Shenandoah and who transferred from another Virginia college to play for the new team in 2000. “It’s America’s game. And, who doesn’t like tailgating before the game?” At Utica College in upstate New York, which fielded its first football team in 2001, Mike Kemp, the coach, reaches out to the sons of working-class families who might not otherwise attend college. “Hockey, lacrosse and tennis players, they all have money and 1,500 SAT scores,” said Mr. Kemp, who brings about 70 players a year to Utica. “Those kids are going to college somewhere. But I come across high school football players from blue-collar backgrounds, and as seniors in high school, they’re not sure what they’re going to do. They’re considering a college here or there. But if you give them a chance to keep playing football, then they get motivated to come.” And once they come, he said, “we kind of trick them into seeing that getting an education is the real benefit.” Being admitted to Utica College is not demonstrably easier for a football player than a nonathlete. Utica accepted 84 percent of those identified as football applicants, and its overall acceptance rate is 81 percent. Several institutions inaugurating football teams said that they had no separate admissions standards for football players and that players were not guaranteed slots in classes, as is common among the most competitive academic and athletic institutions. College Board scores and grade-point averages for incoming students fell in a consistent range. At Utica, last year’s freshman class had an average score of 1,000 on the old, two-part SAT and a B average. At Shenandoah, they were also B students with an SAT average of 1,026. Seton Hill said its mean freshman SAT range was 922 to 1,100. Retaining players can be a challenge. Of the 78 players Mr. Kemp recruited for Utica’s first season, only 6 were playing their senior year. The coach said 25 more from that first class gave up the game but graduated within five years. Overcoming Challenges Graduation rates for Division III athletes tend to correspond with those of the overall student body. At the largest universities, the demands of competition can turn athletes into semiprofessionals with notoriously low graduation rates, but those athletes typically represent less than 5 percent of the student body. In Division III, whose athletes sometimes skip team practices, and entire seasons, for academic pursuits, it is not uncommon for athletes to make up 40 percent of the student body — 500 athletes playing 20 sports for an institution of 1,200 students. “The retention and graduation rate for our football players is as good or better than the rest of the student body,” said Dr. Davis of Shenandoah. “And they are involved in no more discipline or behavioral incidents than the rest of the students.” Which is not to say that the introduction of 100 young men, generally large young men, to a small, predominantly female campus, is accomplished without challenge, college officials said. “I’ll never forget when I first brought 14 recruits, including some big 270-pound linemen, through the dining hall door and all conversation just stopped,” Coach Barnes of Shenandoah said. “You could see the looks on the other students’ faces that said, ‘So this is what’s it’s going to be like.’ And then the 14 recruits ate everything the cafeteria people had, they just emptied them out. “The head of the dining staff walked out with this stunned look on his face. He whispered to me: ‘We’re going to have to start ordering a lot more food, aren’t we?’ ” There were bigger cultural issues than a sudden scarcity of desserts. For decades, Shenandoah had flourished because of the reputation of its conservatory of music and theater arts. “That’s a very open group of people, and we have more than a few students living alternative lifestyles and they can be flamboyant about it,” said Scott Musa, a Shenandoah assistant athletic director. “I envisioned the stereotypical meathead football player and what he was going to do or say when he passes two guys walking in the quad holding hands. I was waiting for a serious dust-up. But it never happened.” Several Shenandoah football players from the first team in 2000 said they felt unwelcome most of the first semester. “I was told the place was 70 percent female, and I thought that would be great,” said Wayne Hogwood, who was the starting quarterback in the early seasons and is now an elementary school teacher in Arlington, Va. “But it was rough at first. We were kind of encouraged to stay away. I think they thought we were going to run wild — trashing the dorms and getting in fights.” The coaches quickly established some team rules with an eye on public relations. First, they had every football player serve as an usher at two university plays and concerts. After arriving on campus early for training camp, players helped students and faculty members move into their living quarters. By team rule, football players had to take off their baseball caps in classes, sit in the front row and take notes. “I remember being a little intimidated on campus because there were all these big guys when I had been expecting the campus full of music and theater kids that I saw during my high school visit,” said Jennifer Gursky, a Shenandoah freshman in 2000 and an eventual graduate of the conservatory. “The conservatory students were a little angry, and there was a lot of talk about how those guys were taking away our scholarships. People refused to go to football games. “But eventually,” she continued, “everyone came to understand there were no football scholarships. People started going over to the football games and having fun. The groups began to merge.” At Utica College, the new football players clashed with the existing campus social order. “The fraternities on campus ran the social calendar, but the athletes did their own thing and there were some scuffles,” Mr. Kemp said. “After parties, we would have five frat guys jump a football player. I kept telling my players that they couldn’t fight back. “When it kept happening, I went before the Greek council on campus and told them I was lifting my no-fighting ban. The next week, 12 frat boys jumped 5 football players, and the 5 football players beat them up pretty good. We haven’t had a problem since.” Bryon George was a Utica College football captain and another of the original players. “Athletes became the dominant group on campus,” said Mr. George, now a history and special education teacher and assistant football coach in Rochester. “The fraternities started dying out as the athletic department expanded.” About the same time it started football, Utica added several women’s and men’s sports, like hockey, lacrosse, field hockey and water polo. Creating new women’s teams along with football has become a common response by institutions to help allay concerns about Title IX, the landmark federal law on gender equity. But adding 100 or more football players creates a male-female imbalance not assuaged even by three new women’s teams. Looking for Balance One way to comply with Title IX is to have the percentage of athletes who are female match the percentage of all women on campus. Some institutions faced with this conundrum have simply dropped football. In 1997, Boston University did away with its 91-year-old program. But few of the institutions adopting football said they were trying to show Title IX compliance through proportionality. They were relying on other options, which allow them either to demonstrate that they are accommodating the athletic interests and abilities of women or to exhibit a consistent expansion of opportunities for women. At the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, administrators survey female students each year and ask whether they want another sport. Shenandoah added three women’s sports to coincide with football’s introduction. Mr. Hill, the athletic director, said that the school had close to a 50-50 split among male and female athletes, “if you don’t count football.” “We’ve taken surveys and asked our students, but mostly what we hear back is male students wanting another sport for them,” Mr. Hill said. Donna Lopiano, chief executive of the Women’s Sports Foundation and a former college player, coach and administrator, said the trend toward small colleges adding football teams did not raise Title IX concerns by itself. “But it accentuates the problem,” Dr. Lopiano said. “Because Division III schools are already not in compliance. That was true before they started football.” She added that colleges had an obligation to do more than conduct surveys, arguing that the creation of women’s teams would lead to the recruitment of women in the same way it does for men. At Shenandoah, the bustle of construction is all over campus this summer. A new student center is being built next to the athletic complex, and work has begun on a new home for the school of business. Across Interstate 81, where the college expanded three years ago to construct the new football stadium — which brought $750,000 for its naming rights — a $1 million building with locker rooms and other amenities is close to completion. Alumni and community contributions paid for it. Mr. Bosworth, who came to Shenandoah even though, at 180 pounds, he was 30 to 40 pounds underweight as a tight end, and who stuck out four years of punishing practices for very limited playing time, recently became an assistant football coach at Shenandoah. “When I got here, we were like some lab experiment,” he said one day in June, having dodged the construction vehicles on his path to the athletic center. “Hey, look at the football team, check them out.” While in college, he started dating another student, Sarah Taylor. In May, they became engaged. “Look how great things have turned out,” Mr. Bosworth said with a broad smile. “I get to pursue my passion for football. I’m going to marry a wonderful woman. She’s getting her doctorate in physical therapy. I guess she’ll bring home the bacon in our family.” “When I was going through all those practices,” he added, “people would ask me if it was worth it. Well, none of this happens if Shenandoah doesn’t start a football team. Of course it was worth it.”
 "Photo: photo courtesy of Abby Tabor, The Daily Comet")
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