Delayed and delayed again, Barton still waiting to scratch the 70-year football itch
On the morning of September 5, cell phones across the campus of Barton College started vibrating and squawking with alarms set months earlier. The shiny aluminum on the brand new stadium on the eastern corner of the campus dazzled in the sun. After seven decades, the time had come for football’s return to Barton.
Except it hadn’t. The two classes of football players who had invested themselves in Barton’s football revival already knew long before that morning they wouldn’t be playing. Their opener against Newberry, scheduled for that Saturday, had already been canceled in June, when the South Atlantic Conference adopted a reduced football schedule.
Two months later, the entire re-inaugural season was postponed to the spring. Barton’s wait — 70 years for the school, more than two years for the coaching staff, 12 months for the sophomores who enrolled and redshirted knowing they wouldn’t play a game — will go on another five months. At least.
“Football will be played,” said offensive lineman Ray Miller, a transfer from Hampton, one of two seniors on the team. “One of these days.”
It’s almost impossible to comprehend the degree of disruption the COVID-19 pandemic has introduced into our lives, but it has had its own distinct flavor at Barton, where more than two years of anticipation on campus and in Wilson had been building toward a moment that keeps getting pushed back. And back. And back.
At 1:30 p.m. on that day in September, when Barton football would have kicked off a season for the first time in 70 years, the coach was at home mowing his lawn instead.
“There’s definitely that feeling of disappointment we’re not going to be playing,” said Chip Hester, still yet to actually coach a game in 2 ½ years at Barton. “I’ll tell you this, back in March I never would have thought we wouldn’t play. Never would have thought it. We’ve got smart guys. They know what the deal is. There are some things that are out of our control.”
The Cadillac of D-II football facilities
A car salesman once occupied the corner office that is now Hester’s at a football facility that is both one of the oddest in all of college football and one of the nicest in Division II. When Barton made the decision to restart its football program in 2018, it was starting with nothing, but it didn’t start from scratch exactly.
A new weight room was constructed in an old metal building across the street from the gym that had once been a physical plant warehouse, with logos and fresh paint and high-tech equipment that wouldn’t be out of place in the Southern Conference. And for the football team, it bought the abandoned J.C. Harris Cadillac dealership a half-mile down the road from campus, a building that had sat vacant since 2017, in the shadow of a strip mall anchored by a Save A Lot and a laundromat.
The showroom became a glass-walled meeting room, the sales offices became offices for football and lacrosse coaches, the old repair shop a low-ceilinged indoor facility with the old roll-up doors looking out on two grass practice fields. The parts department was repurposed into a locker room, with LED accent lighting and charging stations. It’s the Cadillac of Division II football complexes. There’s also plenty of parking.
The roster underwent a similar construction. There are a handful of transfers like Miller, two scholarship recruiting classes and a whole bunch of walk-ons. They all bought into the same pitch: The opportunity to build something from the ground up.
“It was really the opportunity to come here and set our own legacy,” said offensive lineman Alex Buschow, a redshirt freshman from Wakefield High in Raleigh who was part of the initial 37-player class that signed in February 2019. “I really trusted coach Hester because when I got recruited here, there were only two coaches here. So I had to trust what coach Hester was saying. Everything he’s said so far has come true.”
Other than the games, anyway. The poster advertising Barton’s inaugural schedule still hangs on the wall in Hester’s office. The dates mock him now. But the other mementos still have meaning: a mockup of the billboard Barton bought along I-40 advertising football’s return, a gold hard hat labeled “Coach Hester.” A mannequin in a Barton uniform stands guard outside.
Hester grew up in Raleigh, went to high school at Millbrook and played football at Guilford College. He won 70 games in 11 seasons as the head coach at Catawba and was most recently the offensive coordinator at North Carolina A&T.
After taking the job, during months where all he could do was plan and recruit, he talked to coaches at Charlotte, at Campbell, at West Florida, all of whom started programs in recent years. Eventually, he put together a staff of five. This became the new foundation of a program that started from zero, decades after its most recent game.
Barton won a Division II basketball national championship in 2007, but its football pedigree isn’t quite as distinguished. As Atlantic Christian College, Barton had a football team from 1920-30 and 1946-50. Peahead Walker, later the very successful football coach at Wake Forest, got his start as the Atlantic Christian football coach in 1926, a side job in the middle of a long minor-league baseball career. The then-Little Christians went 6-1-1 and Walker was off to Elon the next season.
Hester has photos of players from the 1950 team framed in his office, their names written in old-timey script under their stoic black-and-white visages. D.J. “Coddy” Coddington, guard. Bill Swilling. An unnamed coach in a black jacket. They missed attending school with Ava Gardner by a decade. As Barton football history goes, that’s about it. He can hand it, all of it, to a visitor for a closer look.
Hester envisions the team busing up the hill from the practice facility to the stadium before games, making a grand entrance. For this program, tradition is whatever it wants to be.
Playing the long game
Barton has added football and men’s and women’s lacrosse and men’s and women’s swimming in recent years, all designed to bolster enrollment as much as rally alumni support. With an enrollment of 1,200, a 125-man football roster -- with 36 scholarships spread across it -- accounts for a healthy chunk of tuition revenue.
Barton president Dr. Douglas N. Searcy pushed for football upon his arrival in 2015, and while there were certainly financial and emotional benefits for the university, he also drew on his own personal experience. Growing up in Henderson County, his older brother’s football scholarship to Mars Hill opened the door for both Searcy and his sister to attend college.
“The hope is by having a team, young people will attend our institution who never had that chance before,” Searcy said. “In that sense, football is an opportunity. It’s a tool to be used in a way to help them afford and be able to have an education. Think about it: How does that education then trickle down to the rest of their family?”
Without the massive staff, travel and recruiting expenses of an ACC program, there isn’t a ton of overhead. Thanks to $5 million in sponsorships and donations, Barton expects all the start-up expenses, including the 3,500-seat stadium, to be recaptured in about four years, Searcy said. The flip side: Division II schools like Barton also don’t have the resources to conduct the kind of COVID-19 testing that allows Division I schools to play now.
Even with the stadium available -- it still needs a press box and entry gates -- and the football program all dressed up with nowhere to go, there are some outstanding issues still to settle. Barton is a member of Conference Carolinas, which doesn’t sponsor football, so it had to make a scheduling deal with the SAC that allows Barton to play a full schedule without competing for a championship or its players being eligible for all-SAC honors.
UNC Pembroke, which is moving from the Peach Belt to Conference Carolinas, had a similar football arrangement with the SAC but ended up becoming a full football member of the West Virginia-based Mountain East Conference. Chowan, a Conference Carolinas member, competes in the CIAA for football. Barton is going to have to figure something out; the deal with the SAC is probably not sustainable as currently constructed.
“The scheduling piece is difficult when you’re not in a conference,” Barton athletic director Todd Wilkinson said. “We struck gold when Pembroke decided to go to the Mountain East so we could fill that (SAC) slot as a scheduling partner. I feel like it’s a good spot for us to be regionally for sure, with those schools. With that said, in our conference, there’s not a strong move toward football now. That doesn’t mean people won’t consider adding it.”
The university isn’t alone in taking the long view. From the moment the first football players arrived on campus last August, knowing they would spend a year without playing to prepare for this season, everything was building toward this fall. All the work, all the anticipation. At the very least, they’re used to deferred gratification at this point.
Several were recruited under the premise that their redshirt year would allow them to graduate in five years with an MBA. Their timelines are long. This has never been about the next game. It’s always been about the long game.
“Initially I was disappointed,” Buschow said. “I think most people were, because we were so eager to play. But we all realized it was more of an advantage for us as a team to get more preparation and ready for the spring to play football.”
But there’s no question the additional delay was difficult to accept. The college’s 365-day countdown has had to be reset more often than a microwave clock during hurricane season. The players have spun it forward, essentially along the lines of “Hey, we can use all the practice we can get,” but practice isn’t, and was never, the point.
Especially for those who are on their second season and counting waiting for a real game.
“I’m just ready to play someone else, other than the Barton defense,” Buschow said.
Thoughts turn to spring
The point was to get out on the field and compete and see how it goes. But even the minor reward of a spring game was wiped out by the coronavirus. Barton got through a week of spring practice before the university shut down on March 12.
Then the opening game was pushed back to Sept. 12 at Catawba, which left Hester mentally preparing himself to coach his first Barton game on the visiting sideline of a place he coached, as a head coach and assistant, for almost two decades. Now he’s trying to envision himself on the sideline at all.
The stadium, Electric Supply Company Field, sits there waiting. It is now the centerpiece of what was once the outer reaches of the Barton campus, far from the school’s trademark clock tower. It still needs finishing touches, but it has been used for soccer and lacrosse, and would be more than adequate for a home football game, whenever that may be.
The hope, at the moment, is to play that long-awaited first home game on February 27 ahead of a four-game SAC schedule in March. But at this point, honestly, who really knows?
“It’s been odd,” Hester said. “And then especially to turn on the TV and watch other schools competing. Look, I understand there are different levels and all the different levels of preparation they’ve had to do to compete, but it’s been a weird time. It really has.”
Saturday, the Bulldogs were supposed to host Carson-Newman in what would have been their rescheduled home opener. Instead, the Barton players’ thoughts have turned to spring. For Hester, there’s a lawn to mow at home. The countdown ticks on. The phone alarms will all be reset. Again.
This story was originally published October 5, 2020 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Delayed and delayed again, Barton still waiting to scratch the 70-year football itch."
