Can bass fishing and football save Michigan’s private colleges?

David Cagle loved football. He wasn’t sure he was heading to college. He thought maybe he’d go straight to work after high school.

But a coach from Concordia University Ann Arbor recruited him out of Allen Park High School, convinced him that Concordia’s football program was “about making us young men into better men going forward,” said Cagle, a six-foot-one, 240-pound defensive end.

He joined the team because “I could tell that I wasn’t just a number.”

But numbers are not wholly incidental at Concordia or at the other small private colleges in Michigan facing declining enrollment and a shrinking pool of potential students.

Like Concordia, many have responded by focusing on a value proposition beyond small class sizes and professors who know your name: sports, the chance for high school players to compete for a few more years or for weekend athletes to play sports they couldn’t play in high school.

Colleges have added football and basketball, bass fishing and lacrosse, hockey and cornhole, figure skating and ultimate Frisbee.

And many students and their families have shown themselves willing to pay thousands of extra dollars a year to attend a private college if it means four more years of competition.

“We haven’t gotten close to the bottom of the well of students that want to continue their sports journey in college and won’t be playing Division I,” said Robert LeFevre, president of Michigan Independent Colleges and Universities.

A dozen years ago, Concordia was on the verge of closing. It has since nearly doubled its enrollment. Roughly two-thirds of the undergraduate student body plays at least one sport.

“Additional athletic programs certainly have supported our enrollment goals,” said the Rev. Ryan Peterson, Concordia’s vice-president of administration, “and that’s been a great blessing.”

‘Secrets to the sauce’

Jeff Docking, the president of Adrian College since 2005, attributes 72 percent of the school’s enrollment to athletics, “because that’s the number of students that we have now that come in through a coach, instead of through just the regular admissions process.”

Docking was a pioneer of using athletics to increase enrollment.

“I could see back as far as 2005, that the small private liberal arts colleges were in a world of trouble, that they had a broken business model, that they had gotten too expensive, that families couldn’t do it anymore,” he said, “and that they had to figure out another way to bring in students or they were going to go bankrupt.”

The average 18-year-old might not be able to distinguish a good academic program from a great one or make meaningful distinctions between small college towns, but the opportunity to play, he thought, would resonate.

“When that student was sitting around with mom and dad picking the school they wanted to go to, they’d say, ‘Well, they’re all good schools, but there’s only one school that I can go to that has varsity ice hockey or varsity lacrosse or varsity bass fishing or varsity figure skating,” Docking said.

He was right. Adrian spent $30 million right out of the gate adding and updating athletic facilities. It added dozens of teams, each with its own coach and its own recruiting goals. And it more than doubled enrollment.

Docking decided he had “the secrets to the sauce here on how to grow enrollment quickly” and wrote a book called “Crisis in Higher Education: A Plan to Save Small Liberal Arts Colleges in America.”

Across the board growth

Which a lot of college leaders seem to have read.

The federal government keeps precise data on college athletics, in part to track the balance between men’s and women’s sports that is required under Title IX.

Data from 2006 to 2021, the most recent year available, shows that, even as overall enrollment has dropped significantly, most private colleges in Michigan have seen sharp increases in the percentage of full-time students who are also student athletes.

At Albion College, it went from 24 percent to 46 percent; at Alma College, from 25 percent to 55 percent, at Aquinas College, from 23 percent to 49 percent and so on, all the way down to Spring Arbor University, where it went from 8 percent to 43 percent.

It is not a foolproof strategy.

Finlandia University in the Upper Peninsula announced an ambitious expansion plan in the spring of 2014 that began with adding football. It wasn’t enough, partly because Finlandia had already mortgaged much of its campus in a previous effort to stay afloat. The 127-year-old school graduated its final class this spring.

But at many private colleges, leaders say it’s proven to be an effective way to support academics and other aspects of campus life.

For instance, schools that compete in Division III of the NCAA, as many of Michigan’s private colleges do, aren’t permitted to offer athletic scholarships. The tuition dollars that athletic programs bring are generally more than the cost of coaches’ salaries and facilities.

“It turns out these programs are relatively inexpensive to run, because you’re not paying $5 million for a head football coach or $95 million,” Lefevre said. “You don’t have billion-dollar sports facilities. You’re really doing things on a relatively shoestring budget, so the enrollment gains you get do translate directly into money for the classroom.”

Docking is insistent that it can’t be too much of a shoestring. Adrian invested in facilities “because students are coming out of high schools with beautiful facilities,” he said. Every team has a full-time coach. The school pays for travel and hotel rooms and meals on the road.

But, with tuition factored in, athletics still gives every other part of the school a solid boost.

Which students pay for, of course.

Tuition is private schools’ only significant source of funding. The sticker price of private school tuition is well above that of the state’s public universities. Even with the generous financial aid packages available at many schools, the average cost of attendance is often $5,000 to $10,000 a year more than it is at one of the state’s public universities, according to federal data.

Which is a lot of money if a student is only looking for the post-secondary equivalent of a travel sports league.

Docking is convinced student-athletes are getting something more.

“They may come in as lacrosse players and hockey players,” he said, “but they’re going to leave as business professionals and pre-medical students and pre-veterinary students and teachers and historians and all the other disciplines that we offer.”

‘Everything was considered growth’

Since Calvin University in Grand Rapids added a football team this fall, “there has definitely been a felt increase in school spirit on campus and across Calvin nation,” said Noah Toly, the university’s provost. “The 3,500-fan turnout for the scrimmage on Sept. 30 during homecoming and Family Weekend was a proof point.”

And that, he said, was the hope.

Football was meant to be “an on-ramp to Calvin that didn’t exist before,” he said. “In essence, it opens the doors to a Calvin education to more learners, both student-athletes who wanted to play football in college and to those who want the excitement and rhythm of football to be part of their college experience.”

Davenport University was primarily a commuter school when it added athletics in 2002 and still is for at least some of its students.

But its leaders also wanted to offer a more traditional college experience and were building up a brand new campus just outside of Grand Rapids.

Sports were meant “to help transition into a more traditional campus,” said Paul Lowden, the school’s executive director of intercollegiate athletics.

It wasn’t exactly an enrollment strategy, Lowden said, but “since we started from nothing, everything was considered growth for us.”

“We’ve been in growth mode for 20 years,” he said.

Davenport added men’s and women’s ultimate Frisbee teams this year, making for a total of 44 teams on campus.

Leap of faith

When Joshua Schumacher accepted a job coaching football at Concordia University Ann Arbor, they’d only played three seasons, hadn’t won a game and didn’t have a field.

“It was definitely a big leap of faith,” he said.

This year, they’re going into Saturday’s game against the University of St. Francis with a 6-2 record.

The school had a $5 million football field built in 2015. And, as head coach, has found a place mentoring “guys that want to grow as athletes, students, men and as Christians.”

For the players, “I really think it’s a well-rounded experience,” he said, “and I think the small environment lends itself to accountability because you certainly don’t get lost in the shuffle and you get opportunity to keep playing a sport you love.”

Which is more or less what his players say.

Korey Dunson wasn’t sure he’d be able to play college football. He hadn’t been recruited much coming out of River Rouge High School.

But he got a Twitter message in the summer of 2018 from a Concordia coach. It said they saw something in him.

“It was just a gift from God himself, you know, that a coach was seeing potential in me,” Dunson said.

“It was the greatest decision, one of the greatest decisions of my life to come to this university.”

Read more at MLive:

Michigan’s public universities have lost 45,000 students since 2011. It’s about to get worse.

10 Michigan universities offer guaranteed admission to anyone with a 3.0 GPA or better

Title IX complaints filed against five Michigan universities over support for women’s sports