After a hiatus of almost a half century, football is returning to Hendrix College.
After 13 months of research, evaluation and debate, the college's board of trustees have directed the administration to begin football as soon as start-up costs can be raised from external sources. Because of rising costs and a philosophical recruiting conflict with other state colleges, football was discontinued at Hendrix after the 1960 season.
The trustees also voted to add women's lacrosse with the same contingency as football. Hendrix began the only men's lacrosse program in the state this season.
No timetable has been set for implementation of the new sports.
"The good thing is the trustees have given us the time to get our ducks in a row and develop a plan," said Danny Powell, Hendrix athletic director. "I know when we do this, we'll do it right because that's how Hendrix does things. When we do something, we do it with quality."
Hendrix is a member of the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference of NCAA Division III, which does not allow athletic scholarships. When football is implemented, Hendrix will have the only non-scholarship college football program in the state.
As part of expansion of the college's athletic facilities in the last two years, an artificial turf field was added to support the new field hockey and men's lacrosse programs. The field can also accommodate football, but college officials would have to raise funds to add infrastructure attachments, including a fieldhouse. Powell said time will also be needed to add staff, both from the coaching standpoint and also extra personnel in administrative staff, training staff and other support staff.
More than one-fourth of Hendrix students participate in intercollegiate athletics.
"The board believes that the addition of these sports will support the efforts of Hendrix to increase the size, quality and diversity of its student body and to protect recent enrollment gains," according to a resolution recently approved by trustees. J. Timothy Cloyd, president of the college, said the additional sports will also enhance academic opportunities at the 132-year-old college. He said fund-raising for football would not interfere with the college's current $100 million capital campaign.
The decision, announced Tuesday, came about after 13 months of research, debate and discussion among all elements of the Hendrix community, from students to faculty to staff to alumni.
"There were strong opinions on both sides," Cloyd said. "But this was one of the most thoroughly studied and inclusive processes we've had.
"The biggest challenge was to get people to understand what Division III, non-scholarship football really is. It's not like Wampus Cat football. It's not like UCA football. It's not like Razorback football. It's not like Cabot High School football. But it's not intramurals, either. It's a competitive brand of football that doesn't detract from our culture and will give kids the opportunity to participate in a sport they love."
The Hendrix football team will likely have a roster of from 60 to 75 players, none of whom will be on athletic scholarship and all of whom will have to meet the same entrance requirements for the college as any student. The NCAA audits Division III members each year to make sure that no academic funds are used for athletics.
"Our athletic staff has done a good job of making sure that our athletes have the same philosophy and reflect the same academic values as the rest of the student body," Powell said. "It will be no different than football."
Hendrix officials and members of the exploratory committee, all of whom visited various Division III campuses and witnessed Division III football games, also hope adding football make it easier to recruit students, particularly in Texas , throughout Arkansas and in surrounding states in which Hendrix officials operate as a primary recruiting base. After utilizing two consulting firms in the process, research indicates that 95 percent of prospective students considering students would consider having a football team a positive aspect of their college decision.
"We were faced with trying to envision new ways to enhance a total educational experience at Hendrix," said Marty Rhodes, a trustee and co-chair of the college's Football Study Committee. "We're adding to our diversity, something we take pride in as an institution. We're not taking away from the educational experience, but we're creating another opportunity for some of our students and to enhance the college experience."
Hendrix is one of three schools in in the SCAC (Oglethorpe and Southwestern are the others) without a football team. Hendrix would join nine other football-playing schools in the conference and immediately have a built-in schedule.
The study, debate and discussion process, which was completed with a series of town hall informational question-and-answer sessions Tuesday among faculty, staff and students, was described as intense, often volatile.
"I would describe it as polarizing," Rhodes said. "But we looked at every aspect and the biggest problem we found throughout the process was that a lot of people don't understand the difference between Division I football and Division III football. Many of them had the vision of a group of football players who would get off the bus and would be big and dumb.
"That's not the case. The Ivy League doesn't offer scholarships and has good football. The average linemen in Division III weights 230 or 240 pounds.
"And we particularly looked at a number of schools that had dropped football at one point and have recently reinstated it, schools such as Grinnell, Amherst and Shenandoah.
"I recently had a conversation with the president of Charleston College of West Virginia, which recently brought back football after 47 years. The president of that college made the initial statement that as long as he was in charge, they would never bring football back, over his dead body. Now, he told me not long ago was bringing football back was one of the best things to happen at that school. It had declining enrollment and it has grown from 900 to 1400 students and the students are the same quality they've had but it has created a new kind of school spirit."
Division III athletics differs from other NCAA football divisions because athletic scholarships are not allowed, coaches are paid like faculty, and money is not allocated for athletic programs at the expense of academic programs. According to research by Hendrix officials, the average salary for a head football coach in NCAA III is $65,000 a year and the average recruiting budget is $35,000.
"Athletics have always been secondary to academics here at Hendrix, and that will never change," Cloyd said. "We believe that Division III athletics enhances the whole person academically by providing opportunities to compete athletically against our peer institutions, and adding these sports (football and women's lacrosse) only increases the opportunity for our students to compete on the playing field."
The athletic scholarships offered by other Arkansas colleges was a major reason Hendrix dropped football in 1960.. In the late 1940s, Hendrix officials became frustrated because other schools in Arkansas began to subsidize athletics - paying football players' room, board, tuition and oftentimes spending money in exchange for their participation in athletics. According to the 1984 book "Hendrix College: A Centennial History" written by James E. Lester Jr. That development meant that some schools "will have the best football teams that money can buy," former Hendrix College President Matt Locke Ellis said at that time. By the fall of 1955, the Hendrix football team included only 22 players, and over a three-year span the Warriors, one of the state's powerhouses in the 1920s and 1930s, won only one football game. These factors, combined with the mounting expense of fielding a football team, forced the discontinuance of football at Hendrix in 1956. Football returned briefly in the late 1950s but was discontinued following the 1960 season.
The decision to introduce Division III non-scholarship football to Hendrix came after a 13-month study led by Chuck Chappell, a professor of English at Hendrix since 1969 and a 1964 graduate of Hendrix College, and Rhodes, a 1972 Hendrix graduate. Composed of alumni, students, faculty and staff, the football study committee conducted an extensive study to determine the financial feasibility, along with assessing student and alumni interest in the programs, utilizing the external consultants to gain as much information as possible.
"One of the things that convinced me to support this was I learned that it's a requirement in Division III that any endowment that is established to support an academic program, those funds cannot be used to support a football program," said Stacy Sells, a member of the exploratory committee who was initially strongly against the proposal. "I began to understand that this is not taking away from the quality of education, but creating more opportunities for more people."
"This will give high school students who are more concerned about the academic experience in college an opportunity to play another sport without taking away from their academics," said former Hendrix men's basketball coach and athletic director Cliff Garrison, another member of the committee.
"Some of us went to a game at Sewanee (Tennessee) and noticed that the crowd in the second half was a lot larger than the first half because of the atmosphere and excitement," Rhodes said. "I envision some day on a cool, fall afternoon that we may have some students who have never been part of the 'football zone' maybe come out to watch because of curiosity and hearing the crowd and noticing a game going on that is completely different from a Division I game. I think, over time, when people see what we're talking about, some may wonder what the debate was all about."
