Bradley University discontinued its football program after the 1970 season, but now the game is coming back in a new form.
Flag football is one of five women’s premier club sports now available at Bradley, along with soccer, ice hockey, wrestling and STUNT — commonly known as competitive cheer.
“There’s a lot of schools that are trying to find that niche piece for sports, where it’s not full varsity and it’s not the student-run club sports,” said Craig Dahlquist, Bradley’s director of premier club sports.
“It’s a great way to recruit students who have an interest without having the huge pressures of being in a Division I sport.”
Dahlquist tabbed Rob Penney as the flag football coach. Penney, who has coached wrestling and flag football at the high school level and will retire from his teaching career in December, jumped at the chance.
“I came to Peoria in 1993, and I’ve been a big fan of Bradley Sports since I got here,” said Penney. “I thought it’d be amazing to be a Bradley coach, and I thought this is the best retirement job anybody could ever have.”
Penney said the whole idea is to create more opportunities and activities for women at Bradley.
“In my opinion, there’s just not enough sports sometimes for the women and the girls to get out there and compete in, and flag football is such a such a fast-growing sport and such a high energy sport,” he said.
Dalquist said the premier club sports offer a middle ground between the full commitment of a Division I intercollegiate program and a typical club activity.
“Division I programs are very simple: They are the sports that we have at Bradley University that are following NCAA rules as far as minimum sports sponsorship. They are there to win,” said Dahlquist. “It’s a 6-7 day a week grind at times, and they are many of them on scholarship. On the other side, our club sports have traditionally been student-run.
“This piece in the middle here, the difference is that we’re going to actually be able to hire coaches who can come in and run the program, have a director like myself to help keep all the plates spinning as they will with scheduling and recruiting.”
Dahlquist said the addition of women’s premier club sports could draw around 150 or so new students to Bradley.
“All the challenges are the awareness, making people aware, finding the recruiting base. There are students out there, but we have to find the students who are interested in Bradley and also participating in that program,” said Dahlquist.
“It’s making sure that we can get the resources that we need to get our coaches in front of some of the student-athletes, so they understand and take seriously what we’re doing — because right now we’re not relevant. We need to put the product on the field so people know what we’re doing.”
Penney said he’s anticipating a flag football roster with between 20-25 players, with seven varsity starters per side on offense and defense.
“I think you can find them just about anywhere. If you’re an athletic individual, you have potential to be a flag football player,” he said. “The biggest thing is just being able to run quickly and react to situations and catch a football or pass a football.”
He said while there are significant differences, the basic sport is still football.
“There are probably more similarities than differences,” said Penney. “We have quite a bit of a running game involved with our game, so that it offsets the passing. We set a lot of our passing game up with a with a lot of our run offense.
“That opens the field up for us a lot of times for some nice touchdown passes that look really cool, and the crowds love it.”
Competition for flag football is expected to start in the spring. Dahlquist said they’re planning to play other Central Illinois programs like Illinois Wesleyan and Eureka College, as a way to keep travel expenses to a minimum.
“We just got invited to go up to Chicago in early March to a Chicago Bears event,” said Dahlquist. “They’ve been very, very good at new programs and trying to help them get started. So as a new team, we’ve been invited to go up there and play at the Bears facility.”
Dahlquist has hired Maddy Maloof as the inaugural women’s ice hockey coach and Matt Blackford as the women’s soccer coach. Both programs will begin competing this academic year, while the wrestling and cheer teams are expected to launch next fall.
“Long term, we want to have a very consistent number of students who come here every year because this was one of the options they had at Bradley University to participate in a an activity as well as their educational goals,” said Dahlquist.
He added that while five women’s premier club sports are more than enough at the outset, the possibility exists for additional programs in the future.
“There will be discussions on other sports, a long list of them,” he said. “You name a sport, and it’s probably been discussed already.”
