Baseball season is winding down; finally we can break out the pigskin, paint our faces with team colors, and act like fools yelling at the T.V., explaining what the stupid coach did wrong. The seasons here but as you might have noticed, our beloved Skyline doesn’t have a team for us to root for.
Many people are disappointed with this fact and keep asking themselves, “When are we going to get a football team and why haven’t we had one?” It seems like an excellent idea; there are thousands of fans that love the sport, it would bring out some great athletes who are not able to play at one of Skyline’s rival schools CSM or SFCC. Also a load of spectators, who would love to see a Skyline team play one of these rival schools, would show up to support a team of their own. Sadly, the student body is without a team to root for.
It seems that Skyline’s sports program is missing an important part of American sports tradition. Baseball is the American pastime but, football is still America’s most watched sport. Yes we’ve got baseball, yes we’ve got basketball, and yes we’ve got soccer (and don’t say “Well, soccer is called football in other countries”, it’s not the same). Where is the gridiron excitement? There is nothing more heart pumping or electrifying than when two players just smash into each other and you can clearly hear the collision; or when your team is down and a safety pulls in an interception to score the winning touchdown. No sport can compete with the blood, sweat, skill, tears, talent, broken bones, bruises, and busted joints that every player on the football field puts in; not only in games but also in the physically demanding practices. That’s probably football’s greatest attraction; athletes trained to be precise in hitting, tackling, running, jumping, pushing, and catching across a 100 yard field. But with all of football’s popularity, how could Skyline afford not to have a program?
After talking to Andreas Wolf, Skyline’s Dean of Physical Education and Sports Director, we might possibly be content with the fact that Skyline doesn’t have a football program.
According to Wolf, if Skyline had a football team the playing pool for good players would be greatly watered down. So instead of good players going to one team or another, they would have three choices to decide over and that would cause less first-rate players to attend one school. Apparently Skyline has an agreement with its sister colleges, CSM and CCSF, not to run a football program for just that reason.
It does make sense to us why we have this agreement. Who would want a bunch of mediocre teams playing against each other when you can have two quality teams representing our area?
Another damper for the hopes of the potential Trojan football fans is the seldom heard of Title 9. This legislation passed in 1972 ensures gender equality in school athletics programs. This means there has to be as many female oriented sports programs as male oriented programs. If Skyline were to start a football program, this would only favor the men’s sports programs.
The final and most imposing obstacle for creating a football team is the enormous cost. It takes a lot of money to hire coaches, buy and maintain equipment, and pay for field maintenance. The estimated price for all of this is the equivalent of the total sports budget for Skyline College. This information is surely very disappointing for anyone who might have been hoping for a future Skyline football team.
So in summation, we were desperately seeking a way to finagle a football team into Skyline’s sports program but now after investigating the situation we realize that it is only a pleasant dream. Yes, it would be wonderful to have our own football stars to root for but Skyline fans can checkout one of their sister college’s fine football programs to cheer on. With all downsides it might be better to not be selfish and just let things go in our sports program as planned.