Monday, November 16, 2009 10:22 AM CST
Why football hasn't taken hold in the NTC
By RICK DAWSON, Staff Writer
rdawson@jg-tc.com
Teutopolis owns the distinction of being the largest school in downstate Illinois without a football team, and if you’re waiting for the Wooden Shoes to reconsider sometime in the near future, you may not want to hold your breath.
Yet the absence of football at T-Town is hardly at odds with historical trends throughout its region. The National Trail Conference has at best a history of flirting with the sport. Only one school, Stew-Stras, is currently part of a football co-op and only one other, St. Elmo, has ever gone solo.
The NTC isn’t the only league in the state that is essentially football-free, but no conference has more non-football members than it does. The number is up to 10 now that Dieterich has joined. Only the Midland Trail, Dieterich’s former conference, can match that figure. Apart from two other conferences, the Tomahawk and the River Valley, the NTC also has a larger enrollment average than any conference whose majority of teams opt not to carry football.
Were there ever a concerted effort to change, it would likely meet resistance, too. While there’s nothing unusual about small schools maintaining football programs — the only conference in the southern half of the state that is completely without football is the Egyptian Illini, one that is made up of NTC rivals in other sports — a number of obstacles would undoubtedly get in the way.
To name just four:
COST
To operate a football program, the overhead is substantial. Beyond providing equipment for 30 or more players, there is the need to find a playing field, supplement the incomes of five or more coaches, enlist more officials and grounds crew than other sports, and individual players must consider liability.
Inevitably, a small school will find most of its athletic budget tied up in the sport.
“It can get away from you in a hurry,” said Michael Smith, superintendent of Oakland schools and a St. Elmo graduate.
“It’s easily our most expensive sport, but it works out here because the revenue it generates pays for itself and for other athletic programs. Your biggest crowds come from football.”
Cost is the primary reason cited by T-Town Superintendent Dan Niemerg, a graduate of the school and longtime area resident, when explaining why T-Town and football have never mixed.
“I don’t think it’s ever been talked about seriously,” he said. “There’s been speculation. I can remember it coming up in casual conversation, but no real push to look into creating a program.
“One of the things the discussion has been about is that none of the other schools in the National Trail has football — as well as the cost. It’s going to cost several hundred thousand dollars to implement a program like that, so it’s going to be a difficult sell. If we had a power plant in our district and money all over the place it might be different.”
COMPETITION
Insofar as the basketball traditions at T-Town and Effingham St. Anthony are often invoked as potential areas of conflict, one need only look in the direction of another sport. There’s already a major fall activity for boys in each of these towns: baseball.
It’s one of the few regions in the state that decides its conference championship in the fall. Go south to the South Egyptian or north to places like Putnam County, one of just two members of the Tri-County Conference that don’t play football, to find a remotely comparable situation. Putnam County, located in Granville, often travels to this area to find competition during the fall.
Taking a wrecking ball to that arrangement would violate a long-established tradition.
“It’s the old adage that the hardest animal to kill is the school mascot,” said Ben Johnson, the principal at Neoga and the new president of the National Trail. “Having fall baseball and doing your conference championship in the fall, you’ve got some diehards who would object to changing that. But I don’t know.”
Windsor athletic director and softball coach Brian Lee grew up playing baseball in the NTC and finds that football is rarely discussed. Even if a school were to add football it would be expected to continue fielding a baseball team — something most of the communities couldn’t sustain for sheer lack of personnel.
“It’s kind of what your culture is,” Lee said. “Growing up you know your opportunity’s going to be in baseball or basketball or track. You know that from growing up and going through the school system. It’s not based around Friday nights. It’s based around the fall baseball season.
“I really don’t think it’s an issue with any of the kids because they’re brought up in that regard.”
TITLE IX
Bringing another boys’ sport into the mix, especially one that pools the numbers that football does, would require a delicate balancing act on the girls’ side. When T-Town recently added volleyball as a sport it was mandated to offer a boys’ sport, too, and initiated a junior high cross country program.
Small schools might find some corners difficult to cut, especially if such an experiment were to fail. More than one sport could take the brunt of the blow.
APATHY
The notion of Friday night football just isn’t as glamorous here as it is elsewhere. Rarely does football occupy the minutes at school board meetings or come up at conference gatherings.
It’s not that students at Neoga or Windsor don’t go to football games on Friday nights. It’s just that when baseball practice begins on Saturday morning it has already receded from one’s consciousness.
“Never, ever, in 30-some years that I’ve been going to conference meetings has there been a proposal to add football,” said Stew-Stras baseball coach Mark Wascher, the secretary of the NTC for the last 16 years.
“This could be a little bit of prejudice, but I coached at Auburn, which has had a pretty good run at football for a while. . .Someplace along the line, what happens with a quarterback? They have the most chances to get hurt. They get hurt, they’re laid up for the basketball season. To me, if it’s a big school, play some football. If you’re a little school, you like football, sure. But it’s a big school’s sport.”
After 42 years, St. Elmo’s football program came to an end when it suffered its sixth winless season in 12 years in 1986 — then it gently disappeared from the conversation altogether.
“I can remember back in school, you wouldn’t have gotten any grief if you didn’t play football,” Smith said. “But if you didn’t play baseball or basketball it would have been an issue.”
Contact Rick Dawson at rdawson@jg-tc.com or 238-6855.
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