Sports: Intercollegiate: Small colleges rush to add football to supported campus activties, helps recruits new male students

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Football has strong social impact on colleges that institute the sport in their athletics programs. Inter-collegiate atheletics where the schools compete is a major draw of new students, especially males, to college campuses, no matter how small the school is. New York Times carries an article, "Small colleges, short of men, embrace football" (Jul 10,2k6) by Bill Pennington reports:

Some small American colleges, eager to attract men to increasingly female campuses, have taken notice of how many students...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.'

Sports,by Sportikos

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.

One wonders whether a network of small colleges in the USA could join together to lawnch simultaneously teams of soccer players, newly recruited for the purpose, to participate in a new small-college intercollegiate soccer league. The idea here is that football is not so unique that some colleges could greet the rise of interest in soccer ("football" in most other countries). Indeed, these hypothetical small soccer-no-football colleges mite hypothetically compete with larger colleges that alreadey have soccer teams, but don't attract European-level young players.

Tags: Football at small colleges

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• intercollegiateAthletics
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