Incentive program is academic for Arizona State gridders

A National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame (NFF) program aimed at boosting the academic achievement of at-risk high-school student-athletes received a five-year $10.7 million Department of Education grant to expand its services.

Launched in 1998, "Play It Smart" trains academic coaches to work with high-school athletics teams on a year-round basis. The grant will allow the NFF to expand the program to 60 new high schools in underserved areas in 2004 and 2005. In addition, full-time academic coaches will be installed at 20 schools currently participating in the program. The full-time coaches will extend their work with football student-athletes to cover all student-athletes and students involved in extracurricular activities.

Currently, Play It Smart operates at 88 high schools in 55 cities nationwide and serves 7,000 students. The grant will allow the NFF to reach a total of 11,000 students over the course of the five-year life of the award.

As part of the program, academic coaches work closely with head coaches to emphasize the importance of academic achievement and other areas such as NCAA eligibility, SAT preparation and financial aid. Participants also perform community service.

Graduation rates are an indication of the program's success, with 97 percent of seniors graduating from high school and 81 percent of all seniors enrolling in college as compared to 57 percent of their peers.

Ron Johnson, vice-chair of the NFF, believes the reason the program has done so well is its simplicity.

"It's so darn basic," he said. "You give people confidence in themselves, open their eyes to things that they never thought were possible and let them understand that this is something they can attain."

Johnson said the short-term goal is to introduce Play It Smart into 250 schools.

"We're just very proud that we are able to help kids further themselves and move on with their lives and make this a better country," he said.

Highway Cleaners

Sports Academy offers new bachelor program

The United States Sports Academy announced a new upper-division bachelor of sport science degree program among whose primary beneficiaries are former student-athletes who never received a degree.

The program will enroll its first students this fall. Previously, the academy offered only graduate-level degrees. Courses will be delivered

through distance learning on a rolling enrollment basis so students can register any time and study from any place. The academy also will offer the program in residence during the summers.

The new degree track provides majors in sports coaching or sports management and requires 120 semester hours to complete the degree requirements. As an upper-division undergraduate degree program, a minimum of 60 semester credits from a two- or four-year college are required for full standing admission, though students with 49 to 75 hours of credit also may be considered.

Academy spokesman Mark Wetzel said the new program has been well-received.

"We've had a good response from the professional leagues and the national governing bodies," he said. "Community colleges across the country also have gotten on board, because as an upper-division program, it's a perfect fit for their graduates and student-athletes."

The Sports Academy is the largest accredited, sport-specific institution in the world and the only freestanding school of higher learning in the United States offering bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in sports science and sports management, in addition to its extensive continuing-education programs.

-- Compiled by Leilana McKindra

Number crunching

Looking back

The preseason football polls are out, fans are getting their grills ready for tailgating and the turf is being tested on fields around the country -- another season of intercollegiate football is ready for kickoff.

It's been 135 years since this time-honored tradition began -- though it's unlikely those first college football players could have envisioned the impact of their sport. Whether the setting is a stadium with 90,000 screaming fans or metal bleachers with a few thousand faithful followers, few sporting events rouse passion like college football.

The first intercollegiate football game was played between what is now Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, and Princeton University on November 6, 1869, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Rutgers won that first game, 6-4.

According to the Rutgers Web site, the game took place at 3 p.m. that day with about 100 spectators gathered on the field. To distinguish themselves from the others who had come to watch, Rutgers students, including the players, donned scarlet-colored scarves that they converted into turbans.

Unlike present-day football, each score counted as a "game" and 10 games completed the contest. After each score, the teams changed direction. The ball could be advanced only by kicking or batting it with the feet, hands, head or side.

"To appreciate this game to the full you must know something of its background," wrote John W. Herbert, a Rutgers student who played in that first game. "The two colleges were, and still are, of course, about 20 miles apart. The rivalry between them was intense. For years each had striven for possession of an old Revolutionary cannon, making night forays and lugging it back and forth time and again.

"Not long before the first football game, the canny Princetonians had settled this competition in their own favor by ignominiously sinking the gun in several feet of concrete," Herbert wrote. "In addition to this, I regret to report, Princeton had beaten Rutgers in baseball by a harrowing score of 40-2. Rutgers longed for a change to square things."

The next year, Columbia University began playing football, and within a few years most colleges and universities on the East Coast were sponsoring the sport.