Fledgling Roanoke College football team prepares for first game

Few places in Virginia carry a football tradition like Salem. 

The city’s lone high school boasts 10 state championships over the past three decades. Salem has also played host to the NCAA Division III championship game, the Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl, more than 20 times.

Now, Roanoke College looks to build on that gridiron tradition. The Maroons will field a football team for the first time since World War II this weekend, the opener of a five-game junior varsity schedule for the fledgling football program. Kickoff at Salem Stadium against Hampden-Sydney’s JV team is set for 2 p.m. Sunday.

It’s been a whirlwind year for Maroons head coach Bryan Stinespring, who left his post as associate head coach at Virginia Military Institute to restart the Roanoke program last winter.

“On Jan. 10, we had three coaches, four players and no footballs,” Stinespring recalled.

This month, he was watching 61 Roanoke College football players preparing for practice on the newly resodded Alumni Field, the Maroons’ on-campus practice facility. For Stinespring, a longtime Virginia Tech assistant coach who coached in a Division I national championship game for the Hokies, the novelty and humility of the Roanoke job drew him in.

“This was the right place at the right time. To be able to start up a program intrigued me,” Stinespring said. “Legacy is an important part of all of our lives, to be able to leave something behind that you feel really good about. … We get a chance to do something that hasn’t been done since 1942.”

In that year, at the dawn of the United States’ entry into World War II, Roanoke cut its football program as young men flooded into military service. It hasn’t returned until now.

The focus on firsts permeates the Roanoke program.

Athletic director Curtis Campbell, a Pulaski County native who took the helm of the Maroons’ athletic department last spring after serving in the same post at Morehouse College in Georgia, said the impending addition of football and other sports — Roanoke is also starting competitive cheerleading this fall and has recently added men’s and women’s swimming, men’s volleyball, and men’s wrestling to the school’s NCAA Division III sports offerings — was a big draw for the job.

“When you’ve been doing this for a while, you don’t get many opportunities to do something for the first time,” Campbell said. “It sort of invigorates you.”

The players feel the same way.

“I love the idea of starting something new,” sophomore Luke Conner said.

The program’s connection to military service — a large chunk of the 1942 Maroons team wound up serving the country in World War II — was also a draw to Conner, a criminal justice major who hopes to become an Army Ranger after graduation.

Conner is one of the few Maroons who enters the year with experience in the college game. The Covington native played for Ferrum College his freshman season and saw time in eight games for the Panthers as a backup linebacker. When Stinespring, an Alleghany County product himself, took the job at Roanoke, Conner knew he wanted to play for him.

“He’s the only reason I’m playing college football,” Conner said.

Freshman wide receiver Khamari Garner, a Salem High grad, credited another Salemite, Maroons recruiting coordinator Tony Spradlin, with keeping him home for college football. Garner said the energy around his hometown for a college football team is palpable.

“It feels amazing,” Garner said. “We ain’t never had nothing like this before, and I feel like it was a good thing to do for the community.”

It’s that kind of local support that Campbell hopes puts Roanoke College football on the map quickly.

“The primary goal is of course to recruit our own backyard,” Campbell said. “There’s a lot of good high school football in Southwest Virginia, and it’s a well-kept secret. … We think we can build a really good quality Division III football team with students within a 100-mile radius of campus.”

The other draw, the athletic director said, is Stinespring. Football fans in Virginia are certainly familiar with the name. Stinespring played for Covington High and James Madison University before beginning his coaching career at the now-defunct Lexington High School. After spending 1989 as the head coach at Patrick Henry High in Roanoke, Stinespring jumped into the college ranks as a graduate assistant at Virginia Tech in 1990. He rose through the Hokies’ ranks to become recruiting coordinator in 1994, where he enjoyed unprecedented success bringing the commonwealth’s top talent to Blacksburg. He recruited household Hokie names like Michael Vick, Shyrone Stith and DeAngelo Hall, all native Virginians, who led Virginia Tech to the acme of the college football universe. The Hokies lost in the 2000 Sugar Bowl, the national championship game.

Stinespring remained on the Virginia Tech staff until 2015. After stops at his alma mater, James Madison, as well as Maryland, Old Dominion, Delaware and VMI, Roanoke introduced him as the man who would restart the Maroons’ program last November. Campbell said he knew at the time Stinespring was the man for the job.

“I just got the sense of how he cared about people, and that struck a chord with me,” Campbell said. “Take the football off the table … and you’ve got somebody who really genuinely cares about people and cares about developing students and young men in particular.”

Roanoke raised $1.3 million to start the program, the college announced last June, and much of that went to developing a first-class locker room in the Bast Center and a new strength and conditioning facility for student-athletes in the adjacent Alumni Gym.

The school hopes to have 100 players on the roster by the time it competes in the Old Dominion Athletic Conference and NCAA Division III next fall, but Campbell was quick to note that the sport’s addition and related offerings like the school’s new marching band weren’t strictly about growing the college’s enrollment.

“Football is good for this area,” Campbell said. “Roanoke should have had football already. … The fact that it brings in additional students is just icing on the cake.”

Campbell hopes to see that support from the local community starting Sunday. Roanoke is offering free parking and admission for its three home games this season, providing a shuttle from campus for the games, and encouraging fans to tailgate outside the stadium.

For Stinespring, Sunday will be the culmination of a monthslong sprint toward the opening day. But he also hopes his players see the game as something to look back on fondly years in the future. When he’s old and gray, Stinespring said, he hopes to visit Roanoke College and reflect on that first team photo.

“I’m going to walk in and take a look at this picture we took, and that’s going to mean a great deal to me. And I think our players and coaches will do the same thing,” he said.

“For the first time in my life, I’m doing something that’s bigger than the game of football.”

Related stories