How about it, sport?

Community college ponders cross country program

If someone were to tally up all the college and professional athletic events we’ve attended, it would add up to an impressive total, especially the number of Razorback contests we’ve whooped, hollered and wooo-pigged our way through.

The number, though, would pale in comparison, by a long shot, to the number of recreational and competitive games we’ve spent in the stands cheering on our children and their teammates on soccer, football and baseball fields and on basketball courts.

Competitive athletic endeavors, we’re convinced, are an important part of character-building (or character-revealing, as Coach John Wooden suggested). Athletic competition instructs participants in the value of teamwork, instills the desire to set goals, inspires the effort necessary to achieve them and teaches the skills needed to overcome adversity.

Such experiences are not, however, reserved for just the athletic fields. All human endeavors toward the elusive “something better” develop traits such as perseverance, goal-setting and discipline.

Northwest Arkansas Community College, an institution born in 1989 of a desire to make education more accessible within the region, has earned plaudits as a public institution dedicated to expanding knowledge through two-year associate degrees and technical education in a commuter school setting.

Members of the college’s board of trustees and the school’s administrator’s are doing their jobs by constantly pondering ways to make Northwest Arkansas Community College a success.

One of the latest ideas is the addition of a cross country squad as the college’s first sanctioned intercollegiate sports team. Not that this is the first time anyone has pitched a true athletic program at the college. Over the school’s 30-year history, advocates of intercollegiate competition have pursued implementation of sanctioned men’s basketball and baseball as well as women’s volleyball and softball. Cross country is just the most recent version of the idea that intercollegiate athletics can somehow draw students to the Bentonville-based community college.

In 2015, college President Evelyn Jorgenson decided a sanctioned sports program is “not in the best interest” of the college. Back then, a survey of students identified women’s volleyball and softball and men’s baseball as the sports most likely to draw student interest.

Cross country, while probably the least costly possibility for a sanctioned sport, nonetheless re-opens the debate over whether the community college’s interests are served by developing a formal athletics program. In past debates, the final verdict was no.

The school’s founding president, Bob Burns, helped create a resistance to intercollegiate athletics within the college’s DNA. Burns warned in those early days that the “lure of a competitive sports program” represented a real danger to the college’s continued success.

“This possibility transcends any particular board of trustees or administration. It is on the horizon awaiting the right time and place,” Burns wrote in his book about the college. “Having worked at two community colleges where there were intercollegiate programs, I know first hand what some of the issues are. At both of these colleges competitive athletic programs struggled for financial support and attendance at games. Most of the faculty believed that too many limited institutional dollars were being taken away from instructional programs. They had a point; a community college supported in part by local tax dollars should focus on instruction and training …”

Somehow, advocates of sports programming at NWACC appear to believe that’s what’s needed to take the college to some other level as an institution. We argued against such measures in the past; we’re not convinced cross country is key to the college’s educational future, either.

If the idea is to draw students to enroll, it’s healthy to ponder how many students could be supported on campus by simply offering scholarships, based on academics or community involvement or other criteria, rather than through creation of a sports program. How many students a year would choose NWACC based on the availability of a cross country program? Is it significant enough to go down the path of sanctioned sports?

Even if the answer to that question is satisfactory to some, the unanswerable question from the outside looking in is whether cross country — or any other sport — is simply a gateway to a broader athletics program. Given the push for sports in the past, it’s at least a plausible notion.

Few two-year colleges in Arkansas include sanctioned intercollegiate sports programs, because that’s not what community colleges are built for. Indeed, the last time NWACC pondered an athletics program, it irked a good number of state lawmakers who believed the institution was stepping outside its reason for existing.

Unless there’s some new revelation that turns past debates on their heads, Northwest Arkansas Community College should maintain its course as the great community college it is, without sanctioned sports to distract from the reason it was founded.

The best answer to the cross country idea is to run from it.