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News Nuggets, 09.24.05
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Compiled from staff reports and electronic dispatches

Big names helping UNC-P restore grid program

PEMBROKE — The field where North Carolina-Pembroke's football team last played five decades ago is gone, overlaid by progress at a growing school first founded to educate American Indian teachers.

The school thinks it's time to bring the sport back.

The Division II school — with help from Oklahoma basketball coach and UNC-P alumnus Kelvin Sampson and former NFL player Dwight Clark — has begun work to restart the program after a 54-year hiatus. UNC-Pembroke is raising money to build new facilities and has started searching for a coach to lead the Braves back onto the field in 2007.

The latest step came Thursday, when the school launched a fund-raising drive for $4 million to cover the cost of a new field house and press box at the Belk Athletic Complex.

``I see this as something like a snowball,'' Sampson said. ``Get it rolling, and it's got to start somewhere.''

The school — founded in 1887 as the Croatan Normal School — hasn't played a football game since 1951, when the school was known as Pembroke State College. The program was disbanded for a variety of reasons, including money and a lack of interest, said Kevin Rhodes, director of media relations for the athletic department.

But the school has grown steadily in six years under chancellor Allen C. Meadors, reporting a record enrollment of 5,632 students for the fall semester. That represents a 12 percent increase from last fall and nearly 90 percent since 1999.

UNC-Pembroke has also announced plans to expand its athletics program, adding women's golf next fall and football the following year as the 15th and 16th varsity sports.

School officials have said adding football could improve school pride, increase publicity and even provide economic benefits to Robeson County in the southeastern part of the state, a region where high-school football has a strong following and could provide a ready-made recruiting base.

``We wanted to make UNC-P as complete of a university campus as we can make it,'' Meadors said. ``And I think most people who have been around a university will tell you that the fall experience includes football.''

Students certainly seem to agree. The school reported that 92 percent of 1,000 students surveyed last September supported establishing a football program, even though it meant increasing a student athletics fee to help pay for the annual operating cost of about $1 million.

Rhodes said the school has already added bleachers to increase seating to about 1,500 at the Belk Field, home to the school's soccer and track and field programs. The soccer program will eventually move across campus to a separate facility.

``We don't want to build a 10,000-seat stadium and have only 3,000 people show up,'' he said. ``We want to make sure we build what is adequate but leaves room for growth.''

Now school officials are looking for donations to pay for the new facilities. And they figured it couldn't hurt to turn to notable names like Sampson — a 1978 graduate who played baseball and basketball here — and Clark — a Kinston native and Charlotte resident best known for making ``The Catch'' to lift the San Francisco 49ers past the Dallas Cowboys and into the Super Bowl in 1982.

Sampson was so excited by the football plans that he took a day out of a busy recruiting stretch to return to his alma mater for a news conference and campus pep rally, which marked the official start of the fund-raising drive.

``It takes time,'' Sampson said. ``It's like stock. You go up and down with it, but if it's solid and it's a good stock, it will pay off. This is a good investment. For this community and this county, I think it is absolutely the right thing to do.''

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