Posted: 12/17/04
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Hardin-Simmons University and Howard Payne University square off for an NCAA Division III gridiron matchup in Brownwood (left). At right, HSU quarterback takes a snap during another game. |
Texas Baptist universities ask students:
'Are you ready for some football?'
By Marv Knox
Editor
The Mary Hardin-Baylor Crusaders defeated the Hardin-Simmons Cowboys in the second round of the 2004 football playoffs, but both schools went home winners.
The same goes for East Texas Baptist University and Howard Payne University, whose teams didn’t make the playoffs this year.
That’s because no matter what happens on the gridiron, football has been a winner for these Baptist General Convention of Texas schools, their presidents insist.
Football boosts campus life, strengthens recruitment and raises the level of other sports, the presidents said. So, football victories are like a successful extra point after an 85-yard touchdown drive—a great deal, but not the main objective.
The universities compete in the American Southwest Conference. They participate in NCAA Division III, and member schools are not allowed to offer athletic scholarships.
“It’s sports like it used to be and still should be,” said Jerry Bawcom, president of the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, whose Crusaders competed for the Division III title in the Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl Dec. 18.
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University of Mary Hardin-Baylor students overflowing with school spirit cheer on the Crusaders as they advance to the national championship playoffs. |
Mary Hardin-Baylor has achieved national prominence in only its seventh football season. East Texas Baptist restarted its football program in 2000, after a 50-year absence. Hardin-Simmons kicked off again in 1990, 27 years after its last game. And Howard Payne has maintained its program for decades.
When Mary Hardin-Baylor started football in 1998, the first focus was on increasing the number of male students on campus, Bawcom said. Similarly, Hardin-Simmons reinstituted football under President Jesse Fletcher to correct the school’s “gender imbalance,” current President Craig Turner explained. “Far more young women than young men will go to your college if you don’t have football.”
But football is a male-student magnet, the presidents said.
More than 100 young men attend Howard Payne so they can play football, President Lanny Hall reported. “When we started football, we increased our enrollment by 100 male students,” added President Bob Riley at East Texas Baptist. The numbers are even higher elsewhere—160 to 170 at Hardin-Simmons and 170 to 180 at Mary Hardin-Baylor.
Football can attract a surprising number of players to a non-scholarship program—where a good high school player can have a chance at making the team. “In our first year, we had to add a junior varsity,” Bawcom said of the influx of gridiron hopefuls.
All those potential football players translate into a “tremendous plus for enrollment, and it helps us with the gender that we’re looking for,” Turner said, noting Hardin-Simmons’ female-to-male student ratio now is a “reasonable” 56-44. “But when you have a lot more women than men, it’s a very negative impact, and some schools have experienced that.”
So, each year, football brings to the Hardin-Simmons campus nearly 200 male students that no amount of non-football recruiting could attract, he said.
Thanks to the influence of football, the gender balance is about two-thirds female and one-third male at Mary Hardin-Baylor, which was all-female prior to 1971. At East Texas Baptist, the balance is about 50-50, a swing of 10 percentage points in both directions since football kicked off, Riley said. And at Howard Payne, “we’re pretty well balanced, but football helps us,” Hall said.
And football attracts other students who don’t go out for the team.
“Athletes bring their friends and their girlfriends,” Bawcom observed.
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East Texas Baptist University wide receiver Frank Wilson tries to out run University of Mary Hardin-Baylor defensive end Shawn Williams. |
“You bring in some outstanding student leaders, who are Pied Pipers,” added Hall, who was president and chancellor at Hardin-Simmons before taking the helm at Howard Payne. “They have a following and bring with them others from their high schools. I’ve seen non-athletes follow a leader. These students might not have heard about Howard Payne or Hardin-Simmons before, but because the leader is coming, they will follow. This helps build and sustain enrollment.”
For example, Mary Hardin-Baylor’s student headcount has increased by about 350 to 400 students since football began seven years ago, but less than half those students play football, Bawcom said.
Football also strengthens a predominantly Anglo university like Hardin-Simmons by adding diversity, Turner said. “Football helps us recruit minorities,” he explained. “We have some African American and Hispanic players that otherwise we could not recruit. … Some of them could afford to go anywhere, but they wanted to come here to play football.”
NCAA Division III’s non-scholarship sports programs also enrich the universities without busting their budgets, the presidents said.
Since the players don’t receive athletic scholarships, the tuition they pay creates a net financial gain for the universities, not a net loss in expenses.
“Before we started football, we completed a study … and determined we would need 60 to 65 players to make football work financially,” Bawcom recalled. “That first year, we had over 200 kids show up to play football.”
“Without offering them athletic scholarships, our student athletes pay the same as other students,” Turner added. “Whatever it costs us to run the program, we more than make up for with the tuition of the students.”
That contrasts with Hardin-Simmons’ past experience, when it provided football scholarships and competed with state schools many times the university’s size.
“Up to 1963, a significant number of the kids playing football weren’t paying tuition at all,” he said, noting football in the old days ran the university into debt.
“Football pays for itself,” Riley said. “We assured our faculty, staff, trustees and friends of the university that if we got football going, it would generate enough revenue to pay for itself.”
“If we eliminated football today, we would have a financial loss,” Bawcom said. “That’s one thing most alumni and donors don’t understand about a non-scholarship program. It adds to the university, especially if you’ve got good coaches and run a clean program. All of these schools do; they run fine programs.”
And clean programs, too, Turner added. Although some outsiders have accused the schools of compensating for not offering athletic scholarships by recruiting athletes with other scholarships, he insisted that’s not true.
“The percentage of financial aid we provide to athletes and non-athletes is similar,” he said. “Our financial aid program is athletics-blind. It has nothing to do with athletics, which is not even on the (financial aid) application. We provide scholarships based on need and merit.”
“In fact, if they’re a good bass or tenor, we can give them a choir scholarship, but not one for football,” Hall quipped.
The American Southwest Conference compiles annual statistics that detail the kinds of financial aid received by athletes and compares that aid to aid provided to non-athletes, and it shares that material with the NCAA every year, Riley said.
“We hear stories (about alleged cheating), but it would be too easy to see when the statistics come out,” Turner said. “Besides, … these schools are schools of integrity.”
Football also impacts their campuses beyond the stadiums, the Baptist presidents reported.
“We started football primarily to increase male enrollment, but the more important benefits have been improved campus life, campus pride and campus spirit,” Bawcom said.
“It wasn’t as simple as just starting to play football,” he added. “It was a philosophical change in the athletic program.”
Mary Hardin-Baylor wanted to be fair to women’s athletics, so it added some female sports to its roster, he said. The university also started a marching band, which improved its fine arts program, and the cheerleading corps also improved.
“Campus spirit and pride have improved significantly,” Bawcom said. “We’ve doubled the number of kids living on campus—to 1,100 from between 500 and 600. We’ve changed campus life. That’s due to more things than sports, but it was initiated by the change in the athletics program.”
The other presidents echoed those sentiments.
“The Cowboy Band has always been part of Hardin-Simmons’ history, but the Cowboy Band’s greatest exposure to campus is at football games,” Turner noted. “The cheerleading squad is significantly larger for football, and those students and their friends are tremendously involved. The dance team performs at halftime, and we wouldn’t have them without football.
“But more significantly, football gives our kids an activity that cuts across so many lines of separation. They come from different high schools, different parts of the country, but most of them come from schools where football is important.”
“It’s a great fall activity,” Hall said. “We’re fighting for (student) retention. Football gives you a Saturday activity that keeps your students on campus on the weekends. … The school spirit is important.”
Not only has football rejuvenated East Texas Baptist’s homecoming and given students a reason to stay on campus during the weekend, but it gave the university a reason to offer a highly popular new program—marching band, Riley said.
“We have an outstanding music program, one of the best in Texas,” he noted. “We had kids who would come to us and say: ‘I love ETBU, and I love music. I want to come here and be a band director.’ And we’d have to tell them they couldn’t study to be a band director at ETBU, because we didn’t have a marching band.”
But now the university has a 70-member marching band, and many of those students are music majors, preparing to direct bands themselves.
More importantly, football has positively impacted the campuses’ Christian spirit, Riley said.
“There’s something about football players, with their personalities and drive and energy, that’s a little different from other sports and our normal student,” he explained, noting football players bring a “muscular Christianity” to campus.
“That’s certainly not to say we have not had strong Christian young men who are not football players,” he added. “But these guys are impressive. They’re very outgoing. So that has created a difference on our campus. They are conspicuous on campus because of their size and because there are so many of them.
“We had some outstanding young men before football, but the potential for developing more leaders out of our student body now exists.”
And the rising tide of football lifts other sports as well.
Hardin-Simmons beat Mary Hardin-Baylor in their first game this season, and the Cowboys were ranked fourth in the nation until the Crusaders beat them in the playoffs.
“The success of our football team has been an incentive for our other sports to succeed and improve, and that’s been very important,” Turner said.
“Football has made a carryover to the other sports,” Bawcom agreed. “When the football players get out and cheer (other athletic teams), they make a big difference.”
The large football teams also build up the Fellowship of Christian Athletes chapters at the schools, Hall added.
And they’re producing fine Christian coaches for school systems across the state and beyond, Hall and Riley said.
“You’ve had all these athletes come into these non-scholarship programs in our Baptist schools. In the past decade, they’ve had good role models as Christian coaches. It’s impressive the number of coaches produced at Hardin-Simmons and Howard Payne in the past decade.”
“We’re training distinctively Christian young men to go out and be high school football coaches,” Riley confirmed. “For young men who play football, the high school football coach is a major influence. We know we are going to train young men who will make a difference for Christ in the high schools. And it’s the same thing with the band directors we’re training now, too—young men and women who would not be at ETBU if we did not have a marching band, which we would not have if we had not started a football program.”
The non-scholarship aspect of the schools’ football programs helps them embody the collegiate ideal, the presidents insisted.
“We’ve wanted to emphasize the student first and the athlete second,” Bawcom said, noting that’s a major reason why Mary Hardin-Baylor settled on NCAA Division III instead of Division II, which offers scholarships.
“Our kids are truly student athletes,” Turner agreed. “And for our coaches, this is a ministry. (HSU head coach) Jimmy Keeling said to one of our alumni meetings that he could’ve retired earlier, but he continues to do this because he enjoys the opportunity to minister—particularly to young men who have not had a male influence on their lives. A number of kids have made public testimony that Keeling has been like a father and a tremendous influence on their lives.”
“God has really blessed our schools by sending us the kinds of men we needed to direct these programs,” Riley added. “It’s been a blessing for all of us.”
“This brand of football puts football and intercollegiate athletics in the right perspective,” Hall said. “We talk about football building character. I believe in the type of coaches we recruit, and I feel good about what we do with students and how we build character in these young men.”
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