The posters promoting the inaugural football game at Madonna University started going up around its Livonia, Mich., campus last October, and Josh DePaulis grabbed the first one he saw. He hung it on his bedroom wall, and every morning since, he has woken up, stared at it and said to himself two words: It’s coming.
DePaulis, a quarterback, received offers from established programs in Divisions II and III, but so much about Madonna, an N.A.I.A. school, resonated with him. Throwing the program’s first touchdown pass. Beginning traditions instead of following them. Leading as a freshman.
About three months remain until the season opener, which was pushed back two weeks to Sept. 12, and DePaulis’s coach, Brian Foos, has yet to see his quarterback play in pads or take a snap, control an offense or read a defense, call an audible or zip a pass into a tight spot. That all should have happened during spring practices, but the coronavirus pandemic halted Madonna’s debut season before it even started, thrusting plans into disarray.
Madonna is one of four colleges at the N.C.A.A. and N.A.I.A. levels set to launch football this season, the culmination of a process that is expensive and cumbersome under even normal circumstances. But for these schools on the fringes of college sports’ vast machinery, which have heaved financial might and emotional energy into reaching this moment, the coronavirus pandemic has upended promises for a triumphant unveiling in a disproportionate, profound way.
While Erskine College, in Due West, S.C., is counting on the revenue generated from its four home games, its athletic director, Mark Peeler, said the economic impact of a truncated or canceled season, or one played with limited or no fans, would pale compared to the blow to morale and momentum.
“That will definitely set us back financially, but it wouldn’t be nearly as devastating as just the concept of what we kind of started this for,” Peeler said. “We’ve embedded that day in people’s minds.”
“It’s important to make sure that we keep the football program on people’s minds.”
On his phone, Peeler marks the days until Sept. 5, when Division II Erskine — which dealt Florida State its only defeat in 1948 — is slated to play its first game since 1951. Shane Bell, a defensive lineman, said it was hard enough watching other teams play last season while he and his teammates sat out. He, too, had been counting down until the opener but stopped soon after the outbreak forced him to stay home.
“I think I got a little bit depressed,” Bell said. “I was like, ‘I don’t need to count. We might not be playing anyway.’”
The wait has also been difficult for Peeler, who unsuccessfully tried bringing football back to Erskine on at least two separate occasions. Massaging his approach, Peeler told the university president that football would be the only way to spur its growth, and in August 2018, Erskine reinstated its program as part of an extensive plan to boost enrollment, improve financial stability and cultivate a deeper sense of community, enticing students to remain on campus on the weekends.
Peeler sensed the excitement at homecoming last autumn, when about 2,000 people, he said, attended practice and a tailgate. He was expecting far more to attend the spring scrimmage. To recapture that enthusiasm, Erskine redoubled its engagement efforts on social media and started doing football podcasts with guests like Coach Shap Boyd.
“People who didn’t want to have anything to do with the college for many years now want to come back and check things out,” Peeler said. “It’s important to make sure that we keep the football program on people’s minds.”
Though it’s unclear how the pandemic will affect Erskine’s enrollment, the hope, Peeler said, is that its student population will rise to 1,000, from about 800, by 2023. Adding football, he said, will net the school roughly an additional $1.5 million every year in tuition revenue (Division II schools have 36 scholarships to split among their football teams as they see fit, often with partial aid).
Erskine had about 130 players during fall camp, which Boyd likened to elementary school. He spent most of it teaching, trying to get each player to follow the next. Now Boyd must distill the four weeks of lessons he had planned for the canceled spring practice and integrate it into preseason camp.
“The depth of what we can install and what we can do is going to be limited greatly by our kids’ acumen,” Boyd said. “No one’s going to care that we’re playing freshmen — that’s the reality,” he added. “They’re looking at the schedule right now saying, ‘That’s a win,’ and we’re looking at the schedule saying, ‘Dang, we don’t even know.’”
The teams are taking cues from their schools on a return.
With some exceptions, the colleges adding football are operating as if there will be no sports until there are students on campus and in classrooms. Todd Wilkinson, the athletic director at Division II Barton College, in Wilson, N.C., said he expects Division II to recommend six weeks of preseason camp, while the N.A.I.A. said this week that as soon as 47 of its 95 participating football programs are cleared by local authorities to resume play, the season will be authorized to begin. The N.A.I.A. also reduced the maximum number of games to nine from 11 and said that organized practices cannot begin until Aug. 15, giving schools four weeks before competition begins.
Unlike their Division I counterparts, schools like Barton — where enrollment hovers around 1,000 — don’t have the staffing to implement coronavirus-related health measures, from temperature checks to frequent locker-room cleanings, and it could be financially burdensome to adopt those practices. Wilkinson, for one, indicated that he anticipated Barton assistants would assume responsibilities — laundry, perhaps — that otherwise would have fallen to support staff.
“All these things, they’re going to be necessary,” Wilkinson said. “Can they be managed better at a Power 5 school? Probably. We’re a small private school. We’re going to have to find a way to pull it off.”
Barton’s coach, Chip Hester, was hired in 2018, and every time he has been asked to speak at a civic club he has used the same line. He promised that Barton would go undefeated that year, but he couldn’t say the same for 2020, when play would actually start. Hester held spring practice in mid-February. Barton was fortunate to get seven practices in before the campus shut down, canceling the blue-and-white scrimmage, when officials were planning to rehearse game day operations.
“Now the first time we run through a game is probably going to be our first game,” Wilkinson said. “That won’t be much of a scrimmage.”
Barton was set to play 11 games this season before the N.C.A.A. mandated that Division II teams are permitted 10 at most. To comply, it had to drop one of its five home games in its new 3,500-seat stadium, Wilkinson said. Beyond that, the factory producing seat backs for the stadium’s premium section closed. And a delay in uniform production and delivery — to minimize costs, the school initially ordered only enough to outfit about 80 players — led Wilkinson to explore other options, such as whether schools with similar color schemes could assist.
He recently texted Peeler, and together they commiserated over all the ordeals. Isn’t it great, Wilkinson wrote, to be starting a football program in the middle of a pandemic?
“I was like, ‘Yes it is, brother,’” Peeler said. “We knew there would be a lot of bumps in the road. We didn’t know there would be a pandemic.”
Some problems were expected, but not a health crisis.
In a sport whose culture lionizes workaholics and teems with Type-A problem solvers, the uncertainty has been particularly vexing. Coaches are searching for answers that do not exist yet and perhaps will not for a while.
Foos previously assisted at two other N.A.I.A. start-ups — Ohio Dominican and Lindsey Wilson, in Kentucky — and his experience no doubt helped him get the job at Madonna, in January 2019. But, he said with a laugh, he was not asked at his interview how he would guide a team through a public-health crisis, oversee players’ academic progress from afar or cope after a critical fund-raising drive was interrupted, generating about $15,000, far less than expected.
Coaches have been meeting virtually with position groups and on Monday began installing schemes, easing the transition to training camp, which, Foos said, could look different from original plans.
He is considering splitting the roster — about 140 players, he said — and holding a two-hour practice for each group, to maximize instruction and evaluation time. Players gathered on their own for 7-on-7 workouts to hone routes and develop chemistry.
“But our guys don’t even know how to practice,” Foos said, “because we’ve never — they don’t even know where to line up for practice.”
Ernest Jones, the athletic director at Florida Memorial University, lamented a similar situation. The cancellation of spring football after two practices prevented coaches from making a depth chart.
Players were given workout plans, but many didn’t have access to equipment and Florida Memorial, a historically black N.A.I.A. university in Miami Gardens, doesn’t have the resources of Alabama, which sent its team Apple watches to monitor health and wellness. Jones said he hoped players were being diligent on their own.
“Us losing the opportunity to compete, practice, train — yeah, it’s going to catch up to us,” Jones said. “But we have to figure out a way to give our kids a chance to compete. What can we do? This came, and we’re dealing with it.”
**
In his final high school game, in October 2018, DePaulis sustained a spiral fracture of his left ankle, which required a rod and 13 screws to be inserted in his leg. As he pondered whether he would play again, what sustained him, during months of physical therapy and rehabilitation, was his opportunity at Madonna.
Football, he said, is his life, and in these last few months, DePaulis has told himself not to waste any time, since that is something he doesn’t get to use more than once.
The revisions to Madonna’s schedule have rendered the poster in his bedroom obsolete. Pending N.A.I.A. approval, the Crusaders will begin two weeks later than planned, on Sept. 12 instead of Aug. 29, against a different opponent, likely on the road and not at home. It will have been 23 months since DePaulis’s last football game.
And so he uses the video game Madden NFL 20 to take mental reps. He gathers teammates new and old for 7-on-7 workouts and throws with his father in the backyard. He studies coverages and then sketches plays to beat them. In the middle of the night, when he can’t sleep, he’ll review defenses in the notebook he started keeping as a high school sophomore and then try drawing them from memory on the whiteboard in his bedroom.
“My dream wasn’t to watch college football,” DePaulis said. “My dream is to play college football, and I’m just not going to let something that happened in the world that nobody can control take that away from me.”
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