Published: August 17, 2008 12:19 am            

Hugh Conrad | Red Flash need cash to compete

LORETTO — St. Francis football has come a long way in the past four years. The former Pine Bowl has been transformed into a beautiful venue for a Saturday football game with an all-weather surface and seating for 3,450 people at DeGol Field.

In addition, the football team has taken some significant steps under coach Dave Opfar, who is entering his seventh season at the helm of the Red Flash.

However, the won-loss record does not reflect all of this improvement.

Opfar is 15-48 (24 percent) in six years, which does not appear to be impressive, but Opfar has brought a program that had lost 23 consecutive games under previous coach Dave Jaumotte into one that has been more competitive in recent years. He hopes to record his first winning season this fall if his young team makes sufficient progress.

With the new facilities including a field house at the DeGol Field complex, recruits are seeing an attractive facility that will help put them make a decision to attend the Loretto campus.

The reason that Opfar’s record has not kept pace with the talent level of his players is because everyone else is improving for one reason: Scholarships.

For Opfar to continue to make progress, St. Francis has to take the next step to ensure that the program is competitive.

Last spring, the presidents of the colleges in the Northeast Conference voted to increase the number of scholarships that football teams can offer from 30 to 40, a move that makes the situation difficult for St. Francis. That was necessitated because the NCAA awarded an automatic bid for the Football Championship Subdivision postseason playoffs to the NEC beginning in 2010.

While the NEC currently allows 30 scholarships, St. Francis is below that level.

“The presidents just voted to increase the scholarship level to 40, and that goes hand-in-hand with the automatic bid to the FCS playoffs in 2010,” Athletic Director Bob Krimmel said. “Starting with next year, the scholarships will increase by two per year for five years. This will be a challenge for those schools like St. Francis that are currently under 30. We are awarding about 21 right now. Some schools in the conference are at 30 now, while a couple of others are in the low 20s. That is going to be our biggest challenge.”

Recruiting is the major concern for any program, and that requires scholarship money.

Opfar realizes that raising the scholarship limit will be a difficult step for his program.

“It’s going to be an uphill climb, and we knew that,” Opfar said about the increase in scholarships. “The (21 scholarships) keep us competitive since our 11 (on offense and defense) that we put on the field are keeping us close. But, it creates a depth problem if you run into injury and have to put in the next guys. There will be drop-off (in talent level).”

So, in order to increase the number of scholarships from 21 to 30, the St. Francis athletic department needs to raise money, which is not an easy step.

“We have looked at a guarantee game as a way of generating revenue,” Krimmel said. “We are committed to football, and the new facilities will help this. We have to give football the resources that it needs to make it successful.”

St. Francis has put together just one winning season on the field in the past 34 years, a 9-2 record under Frank Pergolizzi in 1992. At that time, however, the program competed in NCAA Division III, which allows no scholarships.

In 1993, colleges with Division I basketball were not allowed to continue as Division III football schools. That led to Division I-AA with limited scholarships. That I-AA is now called FCS.

So, the challenge for making the St. Francis program competitive is going to take some money. That is the only way that the program will experience long-term success.



Hugh Conrad is a free-lance writer who covers St. Francis for The Tribune-Democrat.

        

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