Christian Colleges: Football Scores with Enrollment and Evangelism

Fall means football on college campuses across America. And this fall, more Christian colleges than ever will kick off a varsity football season. Shrinking enrollments and finances in the seventies and early eighties forced many small schools to drop the costly sport. Today, only about 25 of the nearly 80 schools of the Christian College Coalition field teams. But recent years have seen several Christian schools add the sport. What do they see in a program that can cost upwards of $500 just to suit up a player and another several hundred thousand dollars to run? For most: students.

According to Kenneth Meyers, president of Trinity College in Deerfield, Illinois, which began a football program three years ago and plays its first varsity game this month, the number of new students attracted by football has more than offset the approximately $200,000 (not including coaches’ salaries) needed to start a program. Enrollment at the school has grown from about 600 in 1987 to more than 900 this year, and of the 70 players on campus, almost all say they would not be there were it not for football.

New students mean new tuition dollars. But football has provided other payoffs that don’t show on the bottom line, Meyers says. The female/male ratio on campus is more balanced, having dropped from about 60/40, typical of many Christian schools, to 50/50. Contrary to expectations, the new student-athletes have not congregated in the physical education department, but have distributed themselves across many different majors, reviving some smaller programs. Also, football has helped build a sense of community on the campus. And, Meyers says, the team has attracted more publicity for the school in the past three years than it had ever garnered before—due largely to the hiring of former Chicago Bears star Leslie Frazier as head coach.

While most schools, like Trinity, seem content with the enrollment-boosting fruit of their new football programs, others are unabashedly after gridiron glory—for the Lord. Only two years after founding Liberty University (LU), then called Liberty Baptist College, Jerry Falwell proclaimed his intention to build a team to compete at the top level of college football. The climb has almost reached its peak.

“People listen to winners,” says athletic director Chuck Burch. “That’s just the nature of the beast in America. We are committed to evangelism, and sports—especially football—is one of the most effective ways to reach young people.”

Hiring former Cleveland Browns head coach Sam Rutigliano last year vaulted Liberty into the national spotlight; Sports Illustrated featured the team in a November 1989 article. In April, tight end Eric Green was chosen by the Pittsburgh Steelers in the first round of the National Football League draft. This fall, the LU Flames open their second season of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) play in a new 12,000-seat, $2.8 million stadium, donated by Texas businessman Willard May.

Proper Perspective?

Building football programs, big and small, however, has inevitably raised concerns about the role of sports on campuses. Armed with ample evidence of recruiting payoffs and grade scandals, critics charge that competitive, intercollegiate athletics are permeated with an overemphasis on winning and an underemphasis on education. So to welcome football, chief among athletic sinners, into a Christian college seems especially troublesome to some.

While Christian schools are by no means immune to the problems that plague college athletics, overall they have avoided many of the temptations, says Norm Wilhelmi, creator of the Christian College Sports News Network, a one-minute radio spot. The small size of many schools and the lack of scholarship money work in their favor, says Wilhelmi, who coached for 28 years, 20 of them at the King’s College. “Most [athletes] aren’t looking to play beyond their school years,” he says, which helps keep the student in “student-athlete.”

Only a few larger schools, such as Azusa Pacific University and Liberty, offer full scholarships. As a result, most coaches have only the game and the school to sell to prospective players.

When head coach Max Bowman arrived three years ago at Greenville College, a Free Methodist liberal arts college in down-state Illinois, he found little more than a mandate to start a program and attract student-athletes. The 98-year-old institution had no playing field, no locker room, no scholarships. Bowman, who had coached professional football and served as an assistant at the University of Texas at El Paso, a top-level NCAA team, went to work finding bargain-basement priced equipment and arranging cooperative deals for facilities. He recruited 79 players to Greenville for its inaugural season, surpassing his first-year goal of 50 players, and posted an 8–1 record.

“The quality of kids who come out to play is great,” he says, in some ways better than those courted to play big-league ball. Though he had full support of the administration in his task, Bowman says, he faced more scrutiny than he had ever experienced in Division I. “No one really knew what it took to put a [football] program together, and there were questions at every turn.”

School president W. Richard Stephens could not be more pleased with the way things have gone at Greenville. A two-year preparatory study by a dean’s council made it clear, Stephens says, that the new athletes would be treated no differently from other students. And while a few players did leave (or were asked to leave) as they encountered the school’s strict conduct code and Christian emphasis, Stephens says such departures were no more frequent than those of other students.

Making The Grade

At Liberty, meeting NCAA Division 1-AA standards (which allow up to 70 scholarships) actually meant imposing tougher regulations on athletes. Under LU’s open-enrollment policy, virtually any student who has graduated from high school can be admitted. But starting four years ago, athletes were required to post minimum entrance-exam scores and maintain approximately a 2.0 grade average. The school was also required to hire a full-time academic adviser for the athletic department.

The standards, according to athletic director Burch, have posed no hardship for the team. In fact, of the 27 players who finished their eligibility last fall, 21 earned degrees, 3 finished in summer school, and 2 were drafted into the National Football League and are making arrangements to finish their educations. Only one has no plans to finish.

In spite of the generally good academic record of athletes at Christian schools, however, some still raise questions about the appropriateness of competition at a Christian institution. “Where in the New Testament does it say Christians should be involved in any pursuit in which I benefit at another’s expense, where for me to win is for you to lose?” asks Shirl Hoffman, professor and chairman of Exercise and Sport Science at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He challenges Christian athletic programs to take a harder look at how faith and sport are integrated.

Hoffman advocates doing away with teams representing institutions, replacing head-to-head confrontations with an intramural-like mix of players from several schools playing on both sides. The glamor would be gone, he admits, but the values supposedly built by competition would remain.

Cliff Hamlow, the athletic director at Azusa Pacific, shares Hoffman’s concern over “the almighty win,” but he is not as cautious about competition. “Life is competitive,” Hamlow says. “Win or lose, it’s still the way you play the game that counts. And that’s what we can teach best at a Christian school.”

By Ken Sidey.

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