SALEM, Va. — On a scorching and humid August morning on this southwestern Virginia city, soccer coaching camp is in full swing at Roanoke Faculty. Gamers cheer as a receiver makes a leaping one-handed catch, and linemen sweat by means of blocking drills. Observe hums alongside like a well-oiled machine — but that is the primary day this staff has practiced, ever.
The truth is, it’s the primary day of observe for a Roanoke Faculty varsity soccer staff since 1942, when the faculty dropped soccer within the midst of World Warfare II.
Roanoke is one among a couple of dozen faculties which have added soccer applications within the final two years, with a number of extra set to take action in 2026. They hope that having a staff will enhance enrollment, particularly of males, whose ranks in faculty have been falling. But analysis persistently finds that whereas enrollment might spike initially, including soccer doesn’t produce long-term enrollment positive aspects, or if it does, it’s only for just a few years.
Roanoke’s president, Frank Shushok Jr., nonetheless believes that bringing again soccer – and the varied spirit-raising actions that go together with it — will appeal to extra college students, particularly males. The small liberal arts faculty misplaced practically 300 college students between 2019 and 2022, and issues have been prone to worsen; the nation’s inhabitants of 18-year-olds is about to say no and faculties all over the place are competing for college kids from a smaller pool.
“Do I feel including sports activities strategically helps the faculty preserve its enrollment base? It completely has for us,” stated Shushok. “And it has in a time when males specifically aren’t going to varsity.”
Girls outnumber males by about 60 p.c to 40 p.c at four-year faculties nationwide. Roanoke is part of this development. In 2019, the faculty had 1,125 ladies college students and 817 males.
This fall, Roanoke can have 1,738 college students altogether, about half males and half ladies. However the incoming freshman class is greater than 55 p.c male.
“The objective was that soccer would, in a few years, herald no less than a further hundred college students to the faculty,” stated Curtis Campbell, Roanoke’s athletic director, as he noticed the primary day of observe. “We’ve received 97 youngsters on the market on the sphere. So we’re already on the objective.”
That quantity was 91 gamers because the season started, on Sept. 6 — and the Maroons gained their first recreation, 23-7, over Virginia College of Lynchburg, on what Shushok known as “a superb day filled with group spirit and satisfaction.”
“Our college students have been out in power, aspect by aspect with group members spanning the generations,” he stated by way of e-mail. “In a time once we all want extra to have fun and alternatives to collect, it’s simple to say our first soccer recreation since 1942 was each historic and invigorating.”
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Within the NCAA’s Division III, the place Roanoke groups compete, athletic scholarships should not permitted. Athletes pay tuition or obtain monetary help in the identical means as different college students, so including soccer gamers will add income. For a small faculty, this may be important.
Shushok stated it’s not nearly enrollment, although: He needs a livelier campus with extra college spirit. Together with soccer, he began a marching band and a aggressive cheerleading staff.
“It performs to one thing that’s actually essential to 18- to 22-year-olds proper now, which is a way of belonging and spirit and pleasure,” stated Shushok, who got here to Roanoke after being vp of scholar affairs at Virginia Tech. Its Division I soccer staff performs in a 65,000-seat stadium the place followers leap up and down in unison to Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” because the gamers take the sphere.
The Maroons play within the native highschool stadium — it seats 7,157 — and pay town of Salem $2,850 per recreation in hire. The school raised $1.3 million from alumni and company sponsors to get the staff up and working.
Regardless of the analysis displaying restricted enrollment positive aspects from including soccer, faculties hold doing it. A few dozen have added or relaunched soccer applications within the final two years, together with New England Faculty in New Hampshire and the College of Texas Rio Grande Valley. A number of extra plan so as to add soccer in 2026, together with Chicago State College and Azusa Pacific College in California.
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Calvin College in Michigan lately added soccer although the coed physique was already half males, half ladies. The varsity needed to broaden its total attraction, Calvin Provost Noah Toly stated, citing “college spirit, custom, management improvement,” in addition to the elevated enrollment and “strengthened pipelines with feeder faculties.”
A 2024 College of Georgia research examined the results of including soccer on a faculty’s enrollment.
“What you see is principally a one-year spike in male enrollment round guys who come to that college to assist be a part of beginning up a staff, however then that impact fades out over the following couple of years,” stated Welch Suggs, an affiliate professor there and the lead writer of that research. It discovered early modest enrollment spikes at faculties that added soccer in comparison with friends that didn’t and “statistically indistinguishable” variations after the primary two years.
”What occurs is that you’ve a substitution impact happening,” Suggs stated. “There’s a inhabitants of scholars that basically need to go to a soccer college; the soccer tradition and every little thing with it actually attracts some college students. And there are others who actually don’t care by some means. And so I feel what occurs is that you’re merely recruiting from completely different swimming pools.”
At present, faculty leaders worth any pool that features males. Most choose the campus inhabitants to be balanced between the sexes, and, contemplating the low variety of male highschool graduates going to varsity in any respect (39 p.c within the final Pew survey), many fear about too few males being ready for the longer term workforce.
“ I don’t know that we’ve accomplished a great job of articulating the worth, and of programming to the actual wants that a few of our younger males are bringing on this second,” Shushok stated. “I feel it’s fairly apparent, in the event you learn the literature on the market, that a number of males are feeling undervalued and maybe unseen in our tradition.”
Shushok stated that Roanoke’s enrollment-building technique was not centered on athletics. The school has additionally solid partnerships with local people faculties, guaranteeing college students admission after they full their affiliate diploma, and has added 9 new majors in 2024, together with hashish research. Shushok identified that whereas freshman enrollment is down barely this 12 months, the group faculty program has produced an enormous enhance in switch college students, from 65 in fall of 2024 to 91 this fall.
About 55 p.c of Roanoke’s college students come from Virginia, however 75 of the soccer staff’s 91 gamers are Virginians. The pinnacle coach, Bryan Stinespring, a 61-year-old Virginia native, is aware of that recruiting territory, having labored on the teaching staffs at a number of Virginia universities in his profession.
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When Stinespring took over as head coach in 2023, hoping to encourage current college students and potential candidates to hitch his new staff, there was no locker room, no shoulder pads or tackling dummies, no uniforms.
“The primary set of recruits that got here on campus, we ran right down to Dick’s, received a soccer, went to the bookstore, received a sweatshirt,” stated Stinespring, referring to a neighborhood Dick’s Sporting Items retailer. “These youngsters got here on campus and so they needed to imagine within the imaginative and prescient that we had.”
College students purchased into that imaginative and prescient; 61 of them joined a membership staff final fall, which performed 4 exhibition video games in preparation for this 12 months. The group purchased in, too; 9,200 followers confirmed as much as the primary membership recreation, about 2,000 of them perched on a grassy hill overlooking the top zone.
Earlier than Ethan Mapstone, a sophomore, dedicated to Roanoke, he was on the verge of giving up soccer, having sustained a number of accidents in highschool. Then Stinespring known as.
“I might hear by the tone of his voice how severe he meant every little thing he was saying,” stated Mapstone, a 6-foot-1-inch linebacker from Virginia Seaside. “I used to be on a go to every week later, dedicated two weeks later.”
To him, the soccer leaders at Roanoke appeared to be “a bunch of individuals on a mission able to make one thing occur, and I feel that’s what drove me in.”
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KJ Bratton, a junior large receiver and switch scholar from the College of Virginia, stated he was drawn to Roanoke not due to soccer however due to the give attention to particular person consideration in small lessons. “You undoubtedly get that one-on-one consideration along with your instructor, that undoubtedly helps you in the long term,” stated Bratton.
Jaden Davis, a sophomore large receiver who was an honor roll scholar in highschool, stated, “ The employees, they care about all the scholars. They’ll pull you apart, they know you personally, they’ll ship you emails, invite you to workplace hours, and so they simply work with you to do the very best you may.”
Not everybody was on board with soccer returning to the faculty when the plan was first introduced. Some college and directors have been involved soccer would change the campus tradition, stated Campbell, the athletic director.
“There have been simply stereotypes about soccer gamers,” he stated. “You recognize, they’re not good, they’re troublemakers. They’re gonna do that and so they’re gonna try this, be disruptive.”
However the stereotypes turned out to be unwarranted, he stated. When the membership staff began, he stated, “I received so many compliments final 12 months from college and employees and campus safety about how respectful and well mannered and good our college students have been, how they behaved within the classroom, sitting within the entrance row and simply being function fashions.”
Payton Rigney, a junior who helps out with the soccer staff, concurred. “All of the professors like them as a result of they are saying ‘sure, sir’ and ‘no, ma’am,’” she stated.
Like most Division III athletes, the Roanoke gamers know that they’ve little probability of constructing soccer an expert profession. Mapstone stated there are different causes to embrace the game.
“It’s an important blessing to have the ability to do what we do,” he stated. “There’s many individuals that I converse to who’re older and, and so they reminisce concerning the instances that they needed to play soccer, and it’s very restricted time.
“And although there’s not a future for it, I find it irresistible. It’s a Thursday, my solely downside on the earth is that there’s dew on my sneakers.”
Contact editor Lawrie Mifflin at (212) 678-4078 or mifflin@hechingerreport.org.
This story about faculty soccer was produced by The Hechinger Reporta nonprofit, impartial information group centered on inequality and innovation in schooling. Join the Hechinger larger schooling e-newsletter.
