Keeping the Little Guys in the Game (Published 2006)

Not many college football coaches must persuade a high school quarterback to move to the offensive line or worry about a player growing an inch, gaining a few pounds and becoming ineligible for the team. But for the head coaches of the Collegiate Sprint Football League, these are the situations they face every season.

Sprint football is the same as the traditional game, except for the size of the players. They can weigh no more than 172 pounds.

The five-team league comprises Army, Cornell, Navy, Penn and Princeton. It was founded in 1934 as the Eastern 150-Pound Football League in response to the increasing size of college football players and as a way to give average-size students a chance to play. The league opens its 2006 season tomorrow, when Cornell faces Penn in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

Sprint football is remarkable for the pace at which it is played. The league is full of strong and quick players who will not back down from any collision, and the result can be fast-paced and ferocious.

“It’s a real high-contact league,” said Terry Cullen, who succeeded his father as the head coach at Cornell in 1964. “Nothing but fear holds you back. If you’ve played any football, there’s always that 300-pounder out there, and you got to go low on him or you’ll get killed. Up here, everyone is the same size.”

Through the years, some sprint players have gone on to high-profile careers. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, President Jimmy Carter and Robert K. Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, are among the more famous former players. Nathan Self, an Army Ranger captain who received a Bronze Star, a Silver Star and a Purple Heart for his service in Afghanistan in 2002, was the quarterback and captain of the sprint team when he was at West Point.

Navy, the league’s defending champion, has several current players who have served in the Iraq war, and its quarterback is applying to be a Rhodes Scholar.

Cornell’s alumni are successful enough in their careers that they finance the entire program.

“We’ve got a whole bunch of C.E.O.’s that played for us, a lot of big-time lawyers,” Cullen said. “I’ve coached, I think, 70 M.D.’s. We average about three or four kids that go to medical school every year.”

Many athletes in the league played skill positions in high school and have had to switch from the excitement of having the ball in their hands to the anonymity of blocking in the trenches.

“You get guys who were the best players on their high school teams, so usually they were made the quarterback,” Gene McIntyre, the head coach at Army, said. “Then they come here and you have to tell them: ‘I’m sorry. You need to play another position. How about offensive line?’ My first year coaching here, every one of my linemen had played quarterback in high school.”

The senior linebacker Ryan Engle of Navy said sprint football and “regular football” were the same game.

“Everyone’s wearing pads,” he said. “It’s tackle football. There’s 22 guys on the field at a time. Everything’s the same. The people are just smaller. The hits are still big.”

Because of the game’s speed, coaches employ matchups and blocking schemes not found in major college football or in the N.F.L.

McIntyre described a game against Navy several years ago in which a safety was disrupting his team’s option attack. Army was struggling to account for the safety until McIntyre came up with a solution that would work only in sprint football: He used his center, who could run the 40-yard dash in 4.6 seconds.

“He was able to catch the free safety coming over the top,” McIntyre said with a laugh. “You couldn’t do something like that in any other scheme.”

As in wrestling, making weight is a big part of sprint football. Returning players must weigh in at a hydrated 177 pounds before the season, and all players must make a hydrated 172 pounds with more than 5 percent body fat before the season. Players also weigh in two days before games throughout the season. Shortcuts like steam rooms, diuretics and rubber suits are prohibited.

Because of the weight restrictions, coaches regularly lose players who simply outgrow the game.

“We pick up a good-looking kid as a freshman and he’s 17 or newly 18, and what happens is that they continue to grow,” McIntyre said. “We probably lose, on average, four or five kids a year that just get too big for us through normal maturation.”

Players do not receive scholarships. They also usually do not get to read their names in the newspaper or have thousands of fans chanting their names.

Michael Fullowan, a successful running back and the senior captain at Cornell, said the game provides an outlet for players who might otherwise walk away from football after high school.

“There are a lot of good football players that can’t play in Division I or even Division III because of their size,” he said. “This gives them an opportunity to play. Before I heard about it, I thought I was done playing football.”