SALEM, Va. — On a scorching and humid August morning on this southwestern Virginia city, soccer coaching camp is in full swing at Roanoke School. Gamers cheer as a receiver makes a leaping one-handed catch, and linemen sweat via blocking drills. Apply hums alongside like a well-oiled machine — but that is the primary day this staff has practiced, ever.
In actual fact, it’s the primary day of apply for a Roanoke School varsity soccer staff since 1942, when the school dropped soccer within the midst of World Conflict II.
Roanoke is one in every of a few dozen colleges which have added soccer applications within the final two years, with a number of extra set to take action in 2026. They hope that having a staff will improve enrollment, particularly of males, whose ranks in faculty have been falling. But analysis constantly finds that whereas enrollment might spike initially, including soccer doesn’t produce long-term enrollment good points, or if it does, it’s only for a number of years.
Roanoke’s president, Frank Shushok Jr., nonetheless believes that bringing again soccer – and the assorted spirit-raising actions that go together with it — will appeal to extra college students, particularly males. The small liberal arts faculty misplaced almost 300 college students between 2019 and 2022, and issues had been prone to worsen; the nation’s inhabitants of 18-year-olds is about to say no and schools all over the place are competing for college kids from a smaller pool.
“Do I believe including sports activities strategically helps the school keep its enrollment base? It completely has for us,” mentioned Shushok. “And it has in a time when males particularly aren’t going to school.”
Girls outnumber males by about 60 p.c to 40 p.c at four-year schools nationwide. Roanoke is part of this pattern. In 2019, the school had 1,125 girls college students and 817 males.
This fall, Roanoke could have 1,738 college students altogether, about half males and half girls. However the incoming freshman class is greater than 55 p.c male.
“The purpose was that soccer would, in a few years, usher in at the least an extra hundred college students to the school,” mentioned Curtis Campbell, Roanoke’s athletic director, as he noticed the primary day of apply. “We’ve obtained 97 youngsters on the market on the sector. So we’re already on the purpose.”
That quantity was 91 gamers because the season started, on Sept. 6 — and the Maroons gained their first recreation, 23-7, over Virginia College of Lynchburg, on what Shushok known as “an excellent day stuffed with neighborhood spirit and satisfaction.”
“Our college students had been out in power, aspect by aspect with neighborhood members spanning the generations,” he mentioned by way of e-mail. “In a time after we all want extra to rejoice and alternatives to assemble, it’s simple to say our first soccer recreation since 1942 was each historic and invigorating.”
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Within the NCAA’s Division III, the place Roanoke groups compete, athletic scholarships usually are not permitted. Athletes pay tuition or obtain monetary support in the identical approach as different college students, so including soccer gamers will add income. For a small faculty, this may be vital.
Shushok mentioned it’s not nearly enrollment, although: He desires a livelier campus with extra college spirit. Together with soccer, he began a marching band and a aggressive cheerleading staff.
“It performs to one thing that’s actually essential to 18- to 22-year-olds proper now, which is a way of belonging and spirit and pleasure,” mentioned Shushok, who got here to Roanoke after being vp of pupil affairs at Virginia Tech. Its Division I soccer staff performs in a 65,000-seat stadium the place followers leap up and down in unison to Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” because the gamers take the sector.
The Maroons play within the native highschool stadium — it seats 7,157 — and pay town of Salem $2,850 per recreation in lease. The faculty raised $1.3 million from alumni and company sponsors to get the staff up and working.
Regardless of the analysis exhibiting restricted enrollment good points from including soccer, schools preserve doing it. A few dozen have added or relaunched soccer applications within the final two years, together with New England School in New Hampshire and the College of Texas Rio Grande Valley. A number of extra plan so as to add soccer in 2026, together with Chicago State College and Azusa Pacific College in California.
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Calvin College in Michigan not too long ago added soccer despite the fact that the coed physique was already half males, half girls. The college needed to broaden its general enchantment, Calvin Provost Noah Toly mentioned, citing “college spirit, custom, management growth,” in addition to the elevated enrollment and “strengthened pipelines with feeder colleges.”
A 2024 College of Georgia examine examined the results of including soccer on a college’s enrollment.
“What you see is mainly a one-year spike in male enrollment round guys who come to that faculty to assist be a part of beginning up a staff, however then that impact fades out over the following couple of years,” mentioned Welch Suggs, an affiliate professor there and the lead writer of that examine. It discovered early modest enrollment spikes at schools that added soccer in comparison with friends that didn’t and “statistically indistinguishable” variations after the primary two years.
”What occurs is that you’ve got a substitution impact happening,” Suggs mentioned. “There’s a inhabitants of scholars that actually need to go to a soccer college; the soccer tradition and every little thing with it actually attracts some college students. And there are others who actually don’t care in some way. And so I believe what occurs is that you’re merely recruiting from completely different swimming pools.”
In the present day, faculty leaders worth any pool that features males. Most desire the campus inhabitants to be balanced between the sexes, and, contemplating the low variety of male highschool graduates going to school in any respect (39 p.c in the final Pew survey), many fear about too few males being ready for the longer term workforce.
“ I don’t know that we now have accomplished an excellent job of articulating the worth, and of programming to the actual wants that a few of our younger males are bringing on this second,” Shushok mentioned. “I believe it’s fairly apparent, should you learn the literature on the market, that a number of males are feeling undervalued and maybe unseen in our tradition.”
Shushok mentioned that Roanoke’s enrollment-building technique was not centered on athletics. The faculty has additionally cast partnerships with local people schools, guaranteeing college students admission after they full their affiliate diploma, and has added 9 new majors in 2024, together with hashish research. Shushok identified that whereas freshman enrollment is down barely this yr, the neighborhood faculty program has produced a giant improve in switch college students, from 65 in fall of 2024 to 91 this fall.
About 55 p.c of Roanoke’s college students come from Virginia, however 75 of the soccer staff’s 91 gamers are Virginians. The top coach, Bryan Stinespring, a 61-year-old Virginia native, is aware of that recruiting territory, having labored on the teaching staffs at a number of Virginia universities in his profession.
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When Stinespring took over as head coach in 2023, hoping to encourage present college students and potential candidates to affix his new staff, there was no locker room, no shoulder pads or tackling dummies, no uniforms.
“The primary set of recruits that got here on campus, we ran right down to Dick’s, obtained a soccer, went to the bookstore, obtained a sweatshirt,” mentioned Stinespring, referring to a neighborhood Dick’s Sporting Items retailer. “These youngsters got here on campus they usually needed to consider within the imaginative and prescient that we had.”
College students purchased into that imaginative and prescient; 61 of them joined a membership staff final fall, which performed 4 exhibition video games in preparation for this yr. The neighborhood purchased in, too; 9,200 followers confirmed as much as the primary membership recreation, about 2,000 of them perched on a grassy hill overlooking the top zone.
Earlier than Ethan Mapstone, a sophomore, dedicated to Roanoke, he was on the verge of giving up soccer, having sustained a number of accidents in highschool. Then Stinespring known as.
“I might hear by the tone of his voice how severe he meant every little thing he was saying,” mentioned Mapstone, a 6-foot-1-inch linebacker from Virginia Seaside. “I used to be on a go to per week later, dedicated two weeks later.”
To him, the soccer leaders at Roanoke appeared to be “a bunch of individuals on a mission able to make one thing occur, and I believe that’s what drove me in.”
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KJ Bratton, a junior broad receiver and switch pupil from the College of Virginia, mentioned he was drawn to Roanoke not due to soccer however due to the concentrate on particular person consideration in small courses. “You positively get that one-on-one consideration along with your trainer, that positively helps you in the long term,” mentioned Bratton.
Jaden Davis, a sophomore broad receiver who was an honor roll pupil in highschool, mentioned, “ The workers, they care about all the scholars. They’ll pull you apart, they know you personally, they’ll ship you emails, invite you to workplace hours, they usually simply work with you to do one of the best you’ll be able to.”
Not everybody was on board with soccer returning to the school when the plan was first introduced. Some college and directors had been involved soccer would change the campus tradition, mentioned Campbell, the athletic director.
“There have been simply stereotypes about soccer gamers,” he mentioned. “, they’re not sensible, they’re troublemakers. They’re gonna do that they usually’re gonna do this, be disruptive.”
However the stereotypes turned out to be unwarranted, he mentioned. When the membership staff began, he mentioned, “I obtained so many compliments final yr from college and workers and campus safety about how respectful and well mannered and good our college students had been, how they behaved within the classroom, sitting within the entrance row and simply being function fashions.”
Payton Rigney, a junior who helps out with the soccer staff, concurred. “All of the professors like them as a result of they are saying ‘sure, sir’ and ‘no, ma’am,’” she mentioned.
Like most Division III athletes, the Roanoke gamers know that they’ve little likelihood of constructing soccer an expert profession. Mapstone mentioned there are different causes to embrace the game.
“It’s an ideal blessing to have the ability to do what we do,” he mentioned. “There’s many individuals that I converse to who’re older and, they usually reminisce concerning the occasions that they needed to play soccer, and it’s very restricted time.
“And despite the fact that there’s not a future for it, I like it. It’s a Thursday, my solely downside on this planet is that there’s dew on my sneakers.”
Contact editor Lawrie Mifflin at (212) 678-4078 or mifflin@hechingerreport.org.
This story about faculty soccer was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, unbiased information group targeted on inequality and innovation in schooling. Join the Hechinger larger schooling e-newsletter.
