Still Here, at 172 Pounds and 75 Years

Michael D'Angelo could not have been the starting quarterback and captain for most other Division I varsity football teams. The New Jersey native led his high school team, but his 5-foot-9 frame was ill-suited for the college level. So he, like hundreds of student-athletes before him, took advantage of Penn's sprint football program.

"This is one of the best things that ever happened to me," D'Angelo said. "It gives you the ability to still play football."

Penn is one of just five schools nationwide to sport a sprint squad. It differs in only one way from what Penn coach Bill Wagner calls the "fat boy team": all players must weigh 172 pounds or fewer. By comparison, only seven of 120 players on the varsity preseason roster would make that weight.

Otherwise, Wagner said, "everything's the same. It's fast, it's hard-hitting, and the game's as long as Penn State-Notre Dame." The quality, he said, roughly compares to Division-III heavyweight competition.

When the Quakers took the field for their fifteenth annual Alumni Game last weekend, it marked the start of the 75th anniversary season of lightweight football at Penn.

Its story begins in 1931, when Herbert Hoover occupied the Oval Office and gasoline cost 17 cents per gallon, and when Thomas Sovereign Gates unveiled a plan to reform intercollegiate athletics.

As the New York Times wrote that year, "Ever since the publication of the Carnegie Foundation Bulletin [in 1928] on the overstressing of athletics in American colleges, public and press have been looking for a leader of student sports back to their proper academic relation."

Gates, Penn's first president, proved to be that leader. His plan shifted control of athletics from the Alumni association to a new Department of Physical Education, lowered coach salaries to the pay of other faculty, required that student-athletes receive financial aid on the same basis as all other students, and eliminated other exclusive privileges bestowed on student-athletes.

Finally, under a slogan of "Football for All," 'B' and 150-pound football teams were to be developed "for competitions with the like teams of other universities or with colleges having teams of the same relative strength."

Penn was not the first school to feature the sport - Harvard and Yale played each other in showcase matches prior to the varsity heavyweight games - but it was the first to popularize it. In 1934, Lafayette, Princeton, Rutgers and Yale joined Penn in founding the Eastern Intercollegiate 150-pound Football League.

The weight limit has grown - 158 pounds in 1967, 166 pounds in 1998, and the current standard of 172 in 2005 - and many of the schools have changed, but the league remains. It adopted its newest name, the Collegiate Sprint Football League, nine years ago in an effort to re-brand itself.

"I think the word 'sprint football' in this modern decade is something that shows that the league is fast," said Wagner, who is entering his 37th year coaching Penn. "We wanted to get away from the word 'lightweight' because there were all kinds of issues with wrestling ten years ago about losing weight."

The CSFL created body-fat percentage and urine density requirements to help promote healthier weight-loss. But current CSFL commissioner Steve Erber, who is also an associate athletic director at Cornell, said that as a marketing tool the renaming "hasn't had much of an impact."

Indeed, the league has constantly had to deal with team retention. Penn and Princeton are the only founding schools to survive, with Cornell, Army, and Navy the only other competitors now. Budgetary constraints and, since the passage of Title IX, gender-equity concerns, were too much for the programs at Yale, Lafayette, Villanova and Rutgers to overcome. Columbia lost many players to its fledgling heavyweight squad before the lightweight team folded. And even Princeton has struggled at times to maintain enough student interest to field a full squad.

Yet players, coaches, alumni and the commissioner all share optimism for the future. Mansfield University is going to be admitted to the CSFL on a trail basis in 2008, the first new team in decades. Virginia Military Institute has also expressed interest, although it has been dabbling in that process for years.

"More important is not the jump from five [teams] to six, but that I think Mansfield provides some incentive for some other schools to think about looking in this direction for a football program," Erber said. "Mansfield dropped their [heavyweight] program after 106 years of varsity competition . but they wanted to maintain a football presence on their campus."

The past and present were both on display at the Penn's Alumni Game on Saturday. The contest featured more turnovers than first downs, but neither side - not even several graying, balding alums - held back. The current Quakers won 20-0, for their thirteenth victory in fifteen alumni games.

But at the end of the day, the former players did not complain.

"It's our incentive to work out for the other 364 days of the year," said Mike Zonghetti, who played for Wagner in 1978 and 1979. "Not many 50-year-old guys can say they play. I got more playing time than my son did today in his game."

It was also a chance to recognize the tight-knit family of the alumni community, a community whose financial support has kept the sprint football program afloat at Penn. While the program may not boast former players as famous as Jimmy Carter (Navy) or Donald Rumsfeld (Princeton), it does feature the founder of And One and many successful white-collar professionals.

"Words can't explain what our alumni mean to us," said D'Angelo, the current captain and quarterback. "That's the reason the program's still going . Today's basically the foundation of why we're still here."

Saturday was also another chance to celebrate the sport.

"We're a little more unique because we're probably the closest thing to amateurs in the sporting world," Wagner said.

"They're playing because they love to play the game, love the camaraderie, love the competitiveness, and yet they all realize they came to Penn for a big-time education," he added. "And that theme has kept our program together through my 37 years, and probably for 75 years."

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