Chicago State University is shifting towards establishing a Division I soccer program, forming a college committee to evaluate the potential for making a group.
The college on Thursday introduced the committee members at a information convention. They embody former NFL gamers Howard Griffith, Vaughn Bryant, Tom Thayer and Otis Wilson, together with a number of Chicago highschool soccer coaches, neighborhood leaders and college officers.
The committee ought to present a suggestion on the speculative soccer program’s future this spring, CSU athletic director Monique Carroll stated.
“If that is favorable, we could be looking at Chicago’s only Division I program, right here on the South Side,” Carroll stated. “We will potentially start football as early as fall 2025.”
The college already has performed a feasibility research on the prospect of the soccer program, and the exploratory committee is now the “next step,” Carroll stated. The committee additionally will take into account including new girls’s sports activities groups.
Various questions concerning the doable soccer program have but to be answered. It is unclear how the group can be paid for or the place it might play video games. But as soccer helmets with inexperienced Cougar decals sat earlier than college officers, a marching band opened the information convention with brassy tunes and a muscled mascot danced, college leaders clearly had been optimistic this system would develop into a actuality.
“I think that the important work of the committee is to look and see what’s the road map, what are the steps that need to happen,” Carroll stated. “Is it fall ‘24, ‘25, ‘26? To really come up with actionable items and timetables.”
She additionally acknowledged the committee might decide that this system mustn’t go ahead.
The public college within the Far South Side’s Roseland neighborhood is Illinois’ solely four-year college federally designated as predominantly Black. The college has at occasions struggled with excessive–profile lawsuits and low enrollment within the final decade, together with enrolling simply 86 freshmen in fall 2016. But freshmen and sophomore enrollment has grown sharply during the last 12 months, Chicago State President Zaldwaynaka “Z” Scott stated.
Overall enrollment decreased 2.1% in 2022, with 2,296 college students enrolled within the fall, in line with a college information launch.
The doable soccer program “is one part of our ongoing focus to improve the quality of student life, to make Chicago State University a more attractive destination for new students and to contribute to the ongoing economic development of our community,” Scott stated.
The college operates seven males’s and eight girls’s Division I sports activities packages. The Cougars left the Western Athletic Conference in June, although Carroll stated she expects the college will be part of a brand new convention within the subsequent 12 months, a choice that probably will probably be affected by the prospect of a soccer program.
The college’s baseball group was lower two years in the past, a transfer Carroll pinned on financial uncertainty throughout the pandemic. But the college since has added a males’s soccer group, she added. Carroll stated she is assured the college would be capable to set up the group financially, including that faculty soccer groups sometimes generate income.
When Scott was requested whether or not the potential soccer group would possibly play video games at Soldier Field amid the Chicago Bears’ growing plans to go away the stadium for a brand new one in Arlington Heights, Scott answered with amusing, “If it’s available.”
The group would compete within the Football Championship Subdivision, the second stage of NCAA Division I soccer, a college spokesperson stated.
“I hope that, at the end of this committee, we find that we’re able to move forward with this football program,” stated Griffith, a South Side native and two-time Super Bowl champion. “It can bring so many other people into your program. It could have such an important impact for our community.”
Griffith stated the committee’s suggestion in the end will probably be handed to college leaders who will make a last resolution. The committee must take its time to kind a considerate suggestion, he added.
The new group may very well be an funding within the South Side and its younger individuals, Griffith stated.
“It’s not necessarily about are people playing in the NBA, the NFL or going on and playing any professional sports but the opportunity to have an education,” he stated.
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Source: www.bostonherald.com