Football’s return peps up Pacific 8/5/10 3:32 PM

SPORTS COLUMN
Football’s return peps up Pacific
On Sports
BY KERRY EGGERS
The Portland Tribune, Aug 5, 2010

On Sept. 18, something that has been missing KEITH

BUCKLEY
for 19 years on the Pacific University campus will
magically reappear.
Intercollegiate football.
The Boxers will usher in a new era with a nonconference
game against Claremont-Mudd-Scripps at Lincoln Park on
the Pacific campus.
It will signal the 100th year of football at the Forest
Grove school, but in another way, the first.
The Boxers open the season Sept. 4 at Puget Sound –
ironically, in the same Baker Stadium where the program
died. Pacific’s last game was Nov. 16, 1991, a 35-31 loss at
Puget Sound.
“There are all kinds of fun things about this,” head coach
Keith Buckley says, “and that’s one of them. The students and the townspeople are pretty jazzed up to
have Sept. 18 roll around.”
When college football programs are dropped – always for monetary reasons – they rarely come back.
But something unusual is happening in Oregon. Pacific is back, and George Fox has announced plans to
bring back football in 2013.
“It’s really exciting,” says Buckley, 35, a head coach for the first time after spending four years on the
staff at Division I-AA Cal Davis. “In California, so many schools have dropped football. There are a lot of
kids who want to play college football with nowhere to go.”
Buckley will have no shortage of candidates when camp opens on Aug. 15. He has 110 freshmen along
with 12 transfers and more than 20 upperclassmen who already were on campus.
“We’re scheduled to start camp with 145 kids,” Buckley says. Those are Linfield numbers.
None of those players, incidentally, are on athletic scholarship. Athletic rides are not offered at the
NCAA Division III level, so student-athletes must find other ways to cover the $30,000 annual tuition
costs at the private school.
That is part of the reason Pacific is restoring football.
“One of the quickest ways to bring in more students is to add a football program,” sports information
director Blake Timm says. “The goal is a minimum of 50 new students the first year and 100 new
students a year within five years.”
The female-male ratio of the 1,500 undergraduate students at Pacific last year was 65 percent to 35

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Football’s return peps up Pacific 8/5/10 3:32 PM

percent.
“Any time you can achieve balance in gender,” Timm says, “it’s a good thing.”
“We won’t bring in 110 freshmen every year,” Buckley says, “but this was a great shot in the arm for
male enrollment on campus.”
But there is another, more romantic reason for football’s revival at Pacific.
Nothing creates excitement within a student body like football. A Saturday home football game is a
happening, a chance for everyone to pull together and root for a common cause.
“Since football has been gone, there has been a slump in school spirit,” says Timm, the sports
information director at Pacific since 1998, the year he earned his degree in journalism from the school.
“The fight song isn’t used anymore. The Boxer tosses – where groups fought to take charge of Pacific’s
mascot – went away. Attendance at other sports dropped. We had a lot of alumni who said they weren’t
going to give to the school anymore until football was brought back.”
All that has changed with the rebirth of football.
“There is more general excitement about athletics on campus,” Timm says. “Football is the prime
mover behind that. People come into our building pumped about the prospect of being able to enjoy
what a lot of people think Saturdays in the fall are meant for.”
Football gives Pacific another selling point to all prospective students.
“There are students who look for football as part of the total college experience, whether they play the
game or not,” Timm says.
Pacific’s freshman orientation program will be held during training camp.
“We’ll have a scrimmage the week before the Puget Sound game, and they’re going to bring the entire
freshman class to watch,” Buckley says. “And the sheer numbers of our roster mean we’ll have more
people showing up at volleyball, basketball, baseball games. Our football players will be there, cheering
their schoolmates on.
“I’m a proponent of our guys getting involved in campus activities. I have what we call ‘The plus-one
approach.’ I’m going to force the players to get involved in one other thing – community service, a
church group, a campus club, whatever. Just take advantage of this experience and do more than just be
a football player.”
A fundraising drive that began in 2006 covered the initial investment of nearly $1.5 million, part of
which went to renovation of the stadium behind the school’s Lincoln Park Athletic Complex. Alums who
had played football – and others who didn’t but wanted to see restoration of the program – were the
driving force.
“The support from the alumni has been unbelievable,” Buckley says. “Our admissions director, Jeff
Grundon, played and coached here until football was dropped. He has been a huge help in reconnecting
with former players from the ’80s and ’90s.”
The board of trustees announced it was bringing back football in May 2009, and Buckley began his
duties less than three months later. On Jan. 1, Mike McCabe – a former Pacific player who was head
football coach at Forest Grove High for 12 years – joined on as running backs coach, and soon Buckley
had a full coaching staff.
The first year has mostly been about recruiting players, though. Rather than bring in a number of
transfers, the idea was to build from the ground up.
“The original plan was to bring in 50 freshmen,” Buckley says, “but there were a lot of kids interested.
And many of them were excited about the opportunity to play early in their career. That sold well.

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“The mission of the university as a whole is that four-year experience. We’re taking a long-term
approach to building this program. You take freshmen and mold them and take your bumps and bruises
early, but you have an experienced and seasoned team in three or four years.”
The incoming freshman class has 35 players from Oregon, 30 from California and 25 from Hawaii.
Grundon and defensive coordinator Jacob Yoro – both natives of the islands – were a big part of luring
the latter group.
Maybe the biggest-named recruit is offensive tackle Jared Bridgewater, the Class 6A heavyweight
wrestling champion from Century High. Nine freshman quarterbacks are on the roster. “We’re
anticipating some of them will be able to play,” Buckley says, perhaps a bit facetiously.
The schedule is formidable, with games against six of the other eight Northwest Conference teams
(including two versus Puget Sound), as well as two nonleague games.
I’m going to put the over-under for wins at two. But Buckley says he isn’t going to get lathered up over
the team’s record.
“With this number of freshmen, it’s hard to say what kind of players they’re going to be,” he says.
The best thing is, the program is back. Buckley says the Boxers expect a sellout crowd of 2,000 for the
home opener. The school will co-host with the city a pregame street fair just off campus. There will be
some tailgating, for the first time in 19 years.
Puget Sound, incidentally, was 0-9 last season. No better way to welcome the return of football at
Pacific than with a victory.

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