Deaf school seeks football revival

WASHINGTON – Jim DeStefano and Ed Hottle are trying to see who is crazier. It’s neck and neck.

DeStefano, the athletic director at Gallaudet, has this wild idea: Let’s bring back varsity football to the world’s only liberal arts university for the deaf and hearing-impaired. Never mind that it’s been 11 years since the Bison last played as a varsity team. Forget that – with the exception of an outstanding four-year run in the late 1980s – Gallaudet football has not had a winning season since 1930.

Hottle makes a strong challenge: He can hear, and had never before communicated with a deaf person. He applied to become Gallaudet’s football coach.

“Why not?” said Hottle, 32, who coached last season at Calvert High in Southern Maryland and was previously an assistant at three small colleges. “It’s challenging. It’s unique. You’ve got to remember: Football is football, no matter where you go.”

That sold DeStefano. On June 30, he hired Hottle to be the 33rd coach since Gallaudet began playing football in 1883, and enlisted Hottle in a two-hour daily sign-language tutorial that began July 18. This week, Hottle will run his first practice at Gallaudet with an eye on 2007 – when he and DeStefano hope to return the Bison to full varsity status, playing in Division III.

The administration “made it very clear they wanted to keep football,” DeStefano, who is deaf, said through an interpreter. “But it was very hard to maintain at the club level because a lot of kids weren’t interested in playing if it was at the club level.”

DeStefano said the varsity program disbanded following the 1994 season because of what he termed “lack of interest” from the student body. As a club program, Gallaudet did not subsidize the football team, did not play other varsity teams, and did not employ a full-time coach.

DeStefano said it would cost at least $200,000 annually to fund the program. This is in addition to a fund-raising campaign DeStefano launched to purchase field lights and bleachers for the field on the school’s Northeast campus.

DeStefano has not entirely sold the rest of the administration on football. He thinks a varsity football program will attract more students, not only those who want to play football, but also from the program advertising the Gallaudet name.

“The bottom line is we need to get the numbers,” DeStefano said. “If we get kids to the school and get enrollment to increase, everyone will see. If we hired a football coach, it would help us in recruiting kids from all over the United States.”

Hottle said, “In the minds of some people, they see it as the big, bad football monster.”

In fall 2004, Gallaudet had an enrollment of 1,833 undergraduate and graduate students. Undergraduate tuition last year for U.S. students was $9,630, with room and board another $8,270. By those figures, it would take at least an extra dozen students each school year to offset the costs for the football program.

“While I don’t anticipate a big change in enrollment,” Gallaudet Provost Jane K. Fernandes wrote in an e-mail, “I expect that some students who might have opted to attend another university will enroll at Gallaudet now that we have varsity football and a full-time coach.”