For more than a century college football has been a focal point on many campuses. A new football season walks hand-in-hand with the start of the school year, promoting a sense of pride and togetherness that’s unique among college experiences.

The game continues to grow, even in the face of concerns surrounding football related to the risks of head trauma and other debilitating injuries, and even as some anxious parents begin to shield their children from the sport.

In the past decade, more than 60 new college programs, across all levels of competition, have started up around the country. This fall, seven programs — including one in the Valley — are set to take their first snaps.

Ottawa University of Arizona (OUAZ) has rolled out its new football program with a pair of games in the books, and is preparing for its first home conference game on Sept. 15. It’s a big step for a school — one of eight sister campuses that make up a 153-year-old university based in Ottawa, Kansas — that’s only been in existence since 2017.

Starting a football program from scratch means building facilities, hiring staff and recruiting players in a short amount of time. It’s all part of a larger overall plan – one that’s shared by each school that has added football to their athletics portfolio.

“The intent was to build this university, but to reach critical mass on athletics at an early stage of the university,” OUAZ Athletic Director Kevin Steele said. “But from the beginning it was known that football would be a major part of what we were going to offer to the students here at Surprise. And when I say a major part, it was major part of the enrollment vehicle as well.”

Building block for growth

With the kickoff of the 2018 college football season, there were a record 778 teams playing each weekend. Since 2012, 35 teams have joined that list.

There are brand-new programs like OUAZ, playing in the Sooner Athletic Conference of the NAIA. There also are small-division NCAA programs that have moved up, some all the way to the top step of the Football Bowl Subdivison (FBS).

Football is vital piece of the building process for OUAZ and others. Administrators realize that the sport is far more than an extracurricular activity – it’s a building block for growth, vital to recruiting students, raising revenue and becoming relevant in the community.

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Ottawa University Arizona coach Mike Nesbitt talks about starting the NAIA football program from the ground up.
Kynan Marlin, The Republic

“It’s not just about building a strong athletic program,” OUAZ Vice Provost Dennis Tyner said. “But, at the same time we want to do that for a variety of reasons. One, is that is generates a lot of interest in the community. Two is, it brings great pride to the institution – to have quality athletic programs…”

“Our goal is to build a quality athletic program with quality people.”

The University of South Alabama saw this first-hand when it launched its football program in 2009. Over the past nine years USA has seen enrollment numbers reach an all-time high.

Playing football at the FBS level, according to USA Director of Athletics Joel Erdmann, “has elevated our notoriety, it’s clarified and pushed our brand to more national exposure, it’s enhanced our fundraising efforts, it has unquestionably grown pride in our university and unity among our students and alumni.”

Football provides a selling point when recruiting prospective students and helps turn “suitcase campuses” into weekend meccas of communal gathering for students, alumni and the community.     

And the impact of football at OUAZ shouldn’t be any different. “It solidifies everything else we do here as a university,” Steele said.

Buy-in essential

Starting a football program comes with risk, and not just to the players on the field.

Football isn’t cheap. It has the largest playing roster of any sport, the largest coaching staff, and expensive equipment and maintenance costs. The latter is part of the reason why four junior-college programs in Maricopa County are scheduled to cease operations at the end of this season.

OUAZ’s startup cost is about $28.8 million, which will pay for facilities for the football team and other sports (The O’Dell Center of Athletics, $22 million), a playing field ($4 million), a yearly operating budget that includes travel and other expenses ($400,000), uniforms and equipment ($150,000) and scholarships ($2.25 million). The costs for other new programs have been more than double.

As a smaller startup school OUAZ could not rely on built-in student fees or licensing revenue available to schools such as North Carolina-Charlotte, which began play in 2013 and required a great deal of “buy-in from everybody,” according to Director of Athletics Emerita Judy Rose. Instead, OUAZ has relied on the contributions from donors to meet its budget target.

And the buy-in that Rose mentioned isn’t limited to raising revenue. It has to come across the board – starting with the head coach.

‘You have to have blind faith’

The day Mike Nesbitt accepted the head coaching job at OUAZ he knew it would be a risk. After four seasons coaching West Texas A&M, Nesbitt understood that OUAZ wasn’t “an instant pudding job.”

The vision Ottawa administration sold Nesbitt was painted with brushstrokes of hope and anticipated fruition.

Nesbitt recalls arriving on campus for the first time in January of 2017. In front of him? Two buildings and a dirt parking lot. His initial reaction was, “Can it be done?”

“When you look at this place and look at this job, it wasn’t that we were just starting a football program,” Nesbitt said. “But, we were building a university.

“So, you have to have some blind faith.”

Ottawa recognized how vital it was to secure the right leader who would reflect school values and be committed to the work needed to realize the vision. From day one there was a sense that Nesbitt was that man.

“He was number one on my list,” said Steele, who’s relationship with Nesbitt dates to back to their days at Blinn College in Texas in 2005-06. “He was willing to listen [to the pitch] and started thinking about the opportunities … and starting something he could put his mark on from the very beginning was very attractive to him.”

No shortcuts

Nesbitt was willing to buy into a program with no legacy, and that reality is the hurdle most startup programs face when trying to attract coaches and talent.

Ask Donnie Yantis, who today is an assistant at Arizona State but in 2014 was helping build the brand-new program at Arizona Christian University. When Yantis first got the ACU job he had no office, so he was forced to recruit coaches and players from his kitchen at home.

And due to a zero-dollar recruiting budget, Yantis had to strategically hire coaches in each corner of Arizona so they could help efficiently recruit the whole state at minimal expense.

For Nesbitt, this reality hit home.

“The workload here is never ending,” Nesbitt said, who had to recruit assistants who could make themselves known to every high school in the state and persuade athletes to commit to a school and a program that hadn’t even started classes yet.

“We didn’t have anything. You didn’t have equipment. You didn’t have meeting rooms. You didn’t have a recruiting database. And so that was the thing, because the work here probably for the next ten years will never stop.”

Nesbitt made sure that he surrounded himself with a staff that would embrace the vision as he did and would be committed to the amount of work that lay ahead. There would be no shortcuts or easy ways out, and the work ahead would easily outweigh the pay.  

One strategy Nesbitt and his staff used was focusing on players who got lost in the recruiting shuffle: those waiting on an offer that never arrived, who hadn’t taken their test scores or couldn’t qualify, or who simply were overlooked.

The strategy was to sell OUAZ as an opportunity, and the pitch to build a legacy off the disappointments of the recruiting cycle fueled athletes’ desire to take a chance on a new program.

“It’s a different experience you’re going to be able to tell your grandkids,” said Stetson head coach Roger Hughes, who heavily sold the idea of legacy when reviving the program at the school located in Central Florida in 2013. “You can really have an effect and be a part of something bigger than yourself.”

Nesbitt rounded out his roster by tapping into JUCO players from Arizona, Texas, Utah and beyond. Recruiting deep into August of 2017 — a year before the first game would be played – Nesbitt and his staff brought in more than 150 prospective OUAZ Spirit players.

“We didn’t necessarily think it would be an easy task to bring in 40 to 50 people who would be willing to redshirt their first year of football,” said Tyner, the OUAZ vice provost. “He [Nesbitt] brought in 154.”

For the next 12 months, the future players devoted their time to weightlifting, training and building chemistry.

“The highest high was the first team meeting we had — when we introduced all the players and all the coaches,” Nesbitt said. “The first time we were all together was probably one of the proudest moments I’ve ever had coaching, because you could sit there and say, ‘Holy cow, we did this.’”

OUAZ’s 2018 football schedule

Ottawa’s home games are played at Spirit Field, 15950 N. Civic Center Plaza, Surprise, Ariz., 85374

Aug. 25 – OUAZ 51, Cetys Universidad 19

Sept. 8 – Langston (Okla.) 63, OUAZ 56

Sept. 15 – Oklahoma Panhandle State, 7 p.m.

Sept. 22 – Lyon, 7 p.m.

Sept 29 – at SAGU (Texas), noon

Oct. 6 – Arizona Christian, 7 p.m.

Oct. 13 – Texas College, 7 p.m.

Nov. 3 – Wayland Baptist, 7 p.m.

Nov. 10 – at Texas Wesleyan, 1 p.m