This past weekend was the varsity season opener at Dalhousie. On a cold Saturday, half of Wickwire field was filled with fans who watched their soccer teams defeat Acadia. Aside from a a scattering of residence students and friends, the stands were pretty quiet.
We know Dal isn’t a sports school. But this weekend, a Dal football team begins its season. Football and university spirit are often synonymous. So will the Dalhousie students come out and support the team? Is school spirit about to change?
This week, Gazette Sports Editor Dylan Matthias sat down with Dal Football president Jeff Pond and talked about Dalhousie school pride.
Jeff Pond: I’ve been to universities in the United States and there seems to be this overwhelming affinity felt by students for their school. You wonder what it is. There is this tangible pride—people bleed the colours of their school. The central force behind all that seems to be sports, with the dominant teams people rally around generally being the basketball team or the football team. Take Texas A&M: they have “shouting practice” the night before a football game. They don’t have cheerleaders; they have yell-leaders organizing a stadium packed with students with hand signals. It’s the focal point of campus life. That’s just the night before the game.
Being at Dal, I did my undergraduate here and now grad school at Dalhousie as well, and comparing what I’ve seen elsewhere with the lack of enthusiasm for the school here made me wonder ‘why?’
Canadian universities are different in terms of the student mentality and affinity for their school, yet you look at Queen’s homecoming and there’s an example of a whole community coming together around pride for their school. You don’t see any of that at Dal, and that’s something that I think Dal needs. That sense of affinity towards the University, that desire to make it a better place and to have something within the Dal community dedicated towards everyone really enjoying their time here that bridged all the divisions you get at a University. Halifax is a great city to go to school in, and Dal is a great school but you want the quality of student experience at the University to mirror the academic experience.
Dylan Matthias: Not to throw the million-dollar question out too early, but how do you go about creating that affinity?
JP: A lot of people would love to know the answer to that question. You really don’t know but you can try. You need to create events that bring the community together. You can fit thousands of people into a stadium at a football game. There’s one common purpose for everyone to come together: you’re cheering for your team, your school and you want to see your side succeed. That’s what ties people together. It’s not just the game, it’s the event built around the shared bond to the school. That’s one of the ways to enhance the Dalhousian experience.
DM: Do varsity games—and when I say ‘varsity’ I include the competitive clubs because the difference is minimal—have that ‘event’ feel right now?
JP: Well, there are serious attempts to (create sports centered events), but you just don’t see the large numbers of students consistently coming out to those events. The ‘event’ atmosphere relies on the number of people who care about and come out to the games more than the games themselves. Some Dal games, yes, but you really need that fan energy more than anything else and for the most part it’s not there. I’ve been to hockey games here, in the days when Dal was the number 3 hockey team in Canada. and Memorial Arena was booming every single home game. You can get that energy and event atmosphere at Dal.
DM: There have been times when the arena is booming, but for the most part, if Dal’s playing St. FX at home, for example, Dal will be out-cheered by opposing fans in their own arena. What makes the difference between a packed arena and an empty one?
JP: I wish I knew the answer to that. It extends beyond hockey and it extends beyond winning. With volleyball, a team which has several undefeated seasons, there are games when there are 30 people out. It’s hard to understand what it really is. St. FX has a very strong alumni support group; they have that affinity. They wear their X-rings with pride; they really do. It could be the small school and the isolation of the campus and town that is conducive to that attachment. But then you have places like the University of Michigan, 40 000 students just outside of Detroit, that has an arena dedicated to volleyball which sells out, women’s and men’s, every game. The biggest thing seems to be that sense of pride people have in their school. If people don’t have that attachment and enthusiasm to come out for their school, those events won’t happens.
DM: Where does that pride come from?
JP: If you take the football club as an example, a large number of our supporters are alumni. The team is driven by students but we received our start-up capital from alumni. It’s collaboration and and making a conscious decision to care about and go the extra mile for their school.You have decades of former football players, people for whom football was an integral part of their time at Dal, who have had a 34 year void, during which they’ve had little reason to give back to the school and now that football’s back they have a renewed sense of attachment.
DM: What did you tell the alumni that have come forward to support the football team that the Athletics department couldn’t tell them about volleyball or basketball or hockey or any other sport?
JP: I’ve always been a football fan and always wondered ‘why the hell isn’t there a football team at Dal?’ My corporate residency happened to be with a Dal alumnus, Jim Wilson, who is a member of the Dal Board of Governors and who chairs the student experience committee. He has a strong affiliation to the University; he bleeds Black and Gold and so do I. We began talking about why there isn’t a team and what football can do for a University; there’s something about football that creates that atmosphere—that community-focused energy—around campus. Then there was an opportunity: a league for a Dal football team to play in that is not at the CIS level. Ever since the program was dropped in the 70s there have been numerous attempts to bring football back at the varsity level that had failed. We started with the idea of a football team, then, there was a league for a team to play in. Five Dal students came together to form a ratified society and in March we gained membership in the AFL. Once that became official, we had something in place, something conceivable, to take to alumni to begin raising the capital. For the first time since 1976, football at Dal was a reality. We were a ratified student society that had gained access to a football league. People wanted to give to us. The alumni support is where a lot of our funding comes from; the players have to pay a fee, we have to go after sponsorship but it was Dalhousian alumni who love their school who gave us the final piece we needed.
DM: Why don’t the alumni come forward in the same way for the other sports?
JP: The football team doesn’t have any other money. The varsity teams are supported by alumni but they also receive funding from the school. With football the difference was the alumni had to come up big for us or we could never have made this happen—and they did that because they wanted this for Dalhousie. It’s been 34 years; school pride at Dal has been flagging for years. This was something new, something exciting; something’s changing at Dal. This word ‘football’ is being said more and more and the momentum keeps growing. People took notice and said ‘wait a minute, football is coming back to Dal?’ It’s now a reality that people never thought would happen.
DM: What are these alumni remembering when they hear ‘football is back at Dal’ and getting excited about?
JP: There was a lot of camaraderie and spirit around that team [that was disbanded in 1976]. Two of our current coaches played together at Dal. They’re still friends today, and now they’re coaching their old team. People remember what it was like and they want that again. At the same time it’s certainly a work in progress and this is very new in many ways but it’s happening because there are so many people from the Dal community giving in order to make it a reality. Every coach is a volunteer; one of our coaches is a Law MBA alumni, another is a Dentistry alumni, another coach’s children go here. People just keep coming forward who want to help this happen and to make this as great as it can be.
DM: Opening day, how many people do you expect?
JP: Expect or hope for?
DM: Let’s start with what you hope.
JP: That question I can’t actually answer right now. There are still issues of seating capacity that we’re trying to resolve. We want to fill Wickwire. The logistics of game day are still being sorted out but we hope to put a couple thousand people in the stands based off of potential capacity.
DM: Generally, the feeling around campus is the Dal football team is changing the way things are done around here. It’s no coincidence that we’re seeing a revival of homecoming this fall as well. Why don’t we see all teams having this much momentum behind them?
JP: This is a startup year. The goal this year is to create a sustainable program. We want to see this program succeed in the long term. We want to be at capacity every single game, rain or shine, because the community is what this team is all about. That energy that a football team brings to a school has been gone for so long. Everyone involved wants to see this team succeed.
DM: How do you keep it going after this year?
JP: I’ve got emails from high school students from around the country who have somehow heard that there’s a football team starting up Dal and that they want to come here to play football and they’re not even at the school yet. We’ve got between 40 and 50 guys on the team, and we’re still looking for big guys to fill our O- and D-lines. So far it coming together and we’ve got a ton of talented people behind the program and all this buzz starting This is a lot of fun. If there’s one way I can describe this entire football process it’s been a lot of fun. Maybe a lot of work but it’s well worth it in the end. What’s going to keep this sustainable is the same thing that brought it back in the first place: you’ve got to have people who want to have football at Dalhousie. You’ve got to have the guys who want to play and we’ll find a way to make it succeed.
DM: Are we a sports school? Are we a football school?
JP: We haven’t been for 34 years. It’s tough to say.
DM: What do you think?
JP: We are days away from our first football game since 1976, I might answer that differently in a few weeks. I want to make this a fun school and I see opportunity for every sport to benefit. You start by getting the community out to support the teams. You see the school succeeding and people wanting to come be a part of the events. Becoming a football school? That’s hard to foresee. A school where people want to come out and support their sports teams? Regardless of what sport it is, it comes down to people coming out and wearing the black and gold with pride. I don’t know what’s going to happen this season. Whatever happens, we’re trying something new.
DM: Will we see a CIS football team at Dal down the road?
JP: We just want to have a football team. We just have a football team. I know that people mention it, of course people are going to talk about that. The last team we had here was a CIS football team. We have a team, with guys on the field. We have lines on the field. Everybody asks me that question in the end and the truth is that’s not part of the plans.
Jeff Pond graduated from Dalhousie in 2008 with a degree in Sociology. He is currently in the 2nd year of the Dal MBA program. A 3rd- generation Dalhousian, Jeff Pond is president of the Dal Football Club and president of the Dal MBA society. Jeff can be contacted at jsjpond@dal.ca
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