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Bill Reynolds: URI football hopes to build on big win over UNH
01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, September 23, 2010
SOUTH KINGSTOWN — The score jumped off the sports page last Sunday.
URI 28, UNH 25.
The same University of Rhode Island football team that has played in virtual anonymity for a long time now, the losing seasons piled one on top of another like corpses in some above-ground cemetery. The same URI football team that for too long now have been yesterday’s news, a losing program playing on a glorified high school field, the echoes of the good times receding more and more into the past and the program slipping more and more into irrelevancy.
How did the Rams beat a UNH team that was much more highly regarded?
More important, should we care?
These are the questions that now swirl around URI football, a program at a crossroads. The plan is to leave the highly competitive Colonial Athletic Conference, which is arguably the best league in what used to be called Division I-AA, and go down to the Northeast Conference, a more regional grouping that includes Bryant. It’s a plan that’s expected to be announced sometime this school year.
It’s in many ways symbolic that the program is at a crossroads.For that matter, so is the entire concept of what used to be called I-AA football, the concept that’s been around since 1978, and gradually changed the way we’ve come to view college football. Now there is the sense that there are two levels of Division I football.
It’s a concept that’s backfired in this age of bigger-is-best, this age where if you don’t play on television, and in front of really big crowds, you don’t really count, at least to the average sports fan. It’s the problem the Ivy League faces. It’s the problem the Rams face.
It’s the problem college football faces, with Northeastern and Hofstra both dropping football, and the recent news that Villanova, another CAA school, is considering moving up to the Big East. Either you are a so-called big-time program, the kind that plays big games on television, or you get lost in the shuffle, the glamour all somewhere else.
This is the landscape Joe Trainer walks on, and it’s full of fault lines.
He is the URI football coach, now in his second year, and rest assured he could walk through the Providence Place mall and no one would recognize him. That’s the way it is around here in this day of age, when people genuflect in front of the Patriots and treat local college football as if it’s glorified high school. Not that Trainer’s going to spend a lot of time worrying about it.
“I worry about the here and now,” he says. “As a coach, you worry about what you can control.”
And Trainer is a coach, no question about it.
He is 42, and he’s been following the bouncing pigskin his entire life. It’s a circuitous journey that’s taken him from Frostburg State to Colgate to New Haven to Villanova, to a head coaching job at Division II Millersville (Pa.). In 2008, he came here as an associate head coach with new coach Darren Rizzi, then went to Bowling Green as an assistant coach before coming back here as the new head coach when Rizzi jumped to the Miami Dolphins.
Have whistle, will travel.
“Money never has been the driving force for me in this business,” he says. “How do you define success? To me, it’s always been about teaching and kids.”
He knows that college football around here is not the religion it is in other parts of the country.
“This is a great level of football,” says Joe Trainer. “The tail doesn’t wag the dog at this level. And kids know when they come that they’re not going to play on TV, and they’re not going to play before 60,000 people. But we still have great players at this level, kids who fall between the cracks, kids who get bigger once they get here, get better.”
No doubt.
Last weekend, we saw UMass travel to Michigan and push the big-time Wolverines to the limit before eventually losing, 42-37. The week before, we saw James Madison upset big-time Virginia Tech. The gap is not always as big as a lot of people would like to make us think.
Maybe most of all, Trainer believes in the future of URI football. He believes he’s selling a great school in a great location, a school that once had its football glory days. And if that was back when Reagan was in the White House, that’s what the future is for, right? Because he is a coach, and coaches always believe in the future, always believe in sunlit Saturday afternoons and scoreboards that wink at them.
“I know we can win because similar schools have won,” Trainer says.
More important, he believes football has a future at URI, regardless of what league it eventually ends up in.
“I wouldn’t have taken this job if I didn’t believe that,” says Joe Trainer.
Spread the word.
URI football is here to stay.
Recent history be damned.
