Arizona Western College scraps football program
YUMA — Arizona Western is dropping football, effective immediately.
The school announced the decision in a press release issued Wednesday afternoon, nine days after head coach Tom Minnick accepted the Garden City Community College job and four days after the Matadors’ 2018 season ended with a 17-10 loss to Lackawanna in the El Toro Bowl.
It was AWC’s 55th alltime season — and, now, last.
“This was an incredibly difficult decision for me and my team to make,” Arizona Western College President Daniel Corr said in the release. “Any time you’re facing the closing of a program, you know you’re going to impact real individual people — your students, your co-workers, your fans — who are passionate about that program. We have talented student-athletes here. We have a dedicated coaching staff. We have a rich tradition and a legacy in football with fans and alums across the region and the country. At the end of the day, the challenges we faced to continue the program — with the uncertain future of the (Western States Football League), the difficulty in putting together a schedule, the inability to fund increased travel — were simply too much.”
AWC had previously announced — back in August — that it was “committed to keeping football in 2019.” That announcement came months after the news that five of eight WSFL schools — Phoenix, Pima, Glendale, Scottsdale and Pima — would be dropping football after the 2018 season.
AWC athletic director Jerry Smith said Wednesday that the August announcement was made under the belief that the Matadors would still be able to piece together a 2019 schedule, but “it just didn’t turn out to be that easy.”
According to Smith, AWC had only seven games lined up for 2019 — two against Eastern Arizona (Thatcher), two against Snow (Ephraim, Utah), one against Air Force Prep (Colorado), one against New Mexico Military Institute and one against Georgia Military.
The NJCAA requires teams to play at least nine games to be eligible for a bowl.
“It didn’t look like we were going to (get nine games),” Smith said. “We weren’t going to go somewhere and play somebody without them making the commitment to come back and play us (the following year). We hadn’t gotten anybody to agree to do that.”
Smith noted that the closest NJCAA football team to Yuma — besides the Matadors’ would-be 2019 opponents — is Cisco College in Cisco, Texas, about 130 miles west of Dallas.
Minnick, AWC’s coach the last 11 years, disputes that a nine-game 2019 schedule was unattainable.
“I got calls from Texas (schools) last week wanting to play,” Minnick said over the phone Wednesday from Garden City. “Trinity Valley and Tyler. I could’ve gotten it done.”
Other options that were explored in an attempt to save the program: either playing California Community College Athletic Association schools while remaining in the NJCAA, or joining the CCCAA altogether.
According to Smith, the NJCAA signed off on the first — “we actually got rules passed with the NJCAA that if we played (CCCAA schools), it would count the same (as playing NJCAA schools).”
The CCCAA, though, wanted nothing to do with AWC.
“They have a rule in their constitution that their teams cannot play teams outside of California; they would have had to change the constitution,” Smith said. “They had a meeting (several months ago) with all the football coaches in Southern California, and called me back saying that they said no unanimously.”
Minnick hinted at the demise of AWC’s program last week, when he told the Yuma Sun upon taking the Garden City job that, “It just was probably the right fit to get out of here before there was nothing left.”
He added that he warned his players last week that there was a “90 percent” chance that AWC would drop football, though Smith said the decision was not reached until recent days — and that it was not a result of Minnick leaving.
“The fact that he left didn’t help any, but we still didn’t have a schedule,” Smith said.
Even if AWC had kept football for 2019, hiring a new coach would have been difficult without the guarantee of future seasons. Minnick is taking his top two assistants — defensive coordinator/ associate head coach Jerry Dominguez and offensive coordinator Michael Orthmann — with him to Garden City, as well as offensive line coach Will Harris.
Though it no longer affects him professionally, Minnick voiced his displeasure with AWC’s decision Wednesday.
Minnick does not buy that the decision was a necessary one for financial reasons, saying: “You can’t tell me it’s about the money. They’ve got money to get it done.”
He also cited several drawbacks to dropping football that he believes are being overlooked, including a drop in enrollment — “AWC is probably going to lose at least about 120 kids (would-be football players)” — and the loss of free publicity brought to the school by former Matadors who go on to star at higher levels.
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