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Written by Lethbridge Herald
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Thursday, November 12 2009, 7:59 PM |
The new University of Lethbridge Stadium seems to be a big hit with the local football community and its supporters.
The new gridiron sporting state-of-the-art artificial turf has taken local football — high school and minor football — to a new level in terms of its presentation.
Seeing as the stadium is part of the U of L campus, is it possible there might come a day when the field might play host to university football? And what would it take to make that happen?
Canadian universities smaller than U of L have football programs, some of them very successful. Mount Allison in Sackville, N.B., and Acadia University in Wolfville, N.S., have school populations less than half the size of the U of L, and Bishop’s University in Sherbooke, Que., is also much smaller than its counterpart in Lethbridge.
Mount Allison, despite its small size, competed in the national title game, the Vanier Cup, in 1991, and Bishop’s has sent a number of players on to the Canadian Football League.
Southern Alberta is not unfamiliar with success on the gridiron. The area’s high school football programs have made their mark provincially and many graduates of those programs have gone on to play Canadian university football or college football in the U.S. A few have reached the CFL.
There are a number of hurdles — primarily financial — that would have to be cleared before these home-grown players would be able to perform at the university level before a Lethbridge crowd, however.
Football is, first of all, an expensive sport. It requires more players — in some cases, considerably more — than other sports already part of the U of L athletics roster and they all require costly equipment.
Besides a hefty initial outlay for equipment and uniforms, a U of L football team would probably be looking at annual expenses of more than $700,000, estimates Sandy Slavin, the U of L’s executive director of Sport and Recreation Services and Pronghorn Athletics.
A school the size of the U of L is behind the eight-ball in trying to shoehorn those kinds of expenses into its budget, especially in the present economic climate. Covering such sizable costs would require a lot of fundraising as well as alumni donations, not to mention strong corporate support from the local community.
While Lethbridge and area has some strong football schools, it might be stretching the point to call this a hotbed of football (with exceptions being towns such as Raymond and Cardston). Is there enough of a football tradition in southern Alberta to translate into the kind of community support that would sustain university football?
And sustainable support would be vital. As Slavin noted, the Canada West Conference wouldn’t even entertain the possibility of bringing the U of L into the football fold unless it saw evidence of a long-term commitment to financing such a venture.
Even with the new stadium, the possibility of university football in Lethbridge is deep in its own territory and the end zone is a long drive away.
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