There is a movement to return junior college football to the Maricopa County Community College District.
John Crow, CEO of Century 21 Northwest Realty, is spearheading this charge, hoping to be elected to a seat on the MCCCD Governing Board in November, along with two others who support football being reinstatated.
He said one of the platforms they're running on is returning football to Phoenix, Glendale, Scottsdale and Mesa community colleges in Maricopa County. They are the only ones of the 10 college district schools that had football programs before the sport was eliminated.
Crow said that Ryan Carracciolo and Susan Winder, both proponents for the return of football in the junior colleges, are also running for seats on the MCCCD governing board.
It takes four of the seven members to make a change on whether to bring football back. Crow said there is a current member on the board that he feels will favor reinstatement.
Football was cut at the four colleges by the MCCCD board follwing the 2018 seasonwith the main reasons being the cost of insurance, capital expenditures needed for the facilities and travel expenses.
Crow played linebacker at Phoenix College in the late 1980s. He wants to see football return. The website change4maricopa.com was started with the reinstatement of football to the four Valley community colleges being promoted.
"I know firsthand how this works," Crow said of the junior college football experience. "This is a manufacturing program for excellence and future life. This program took kids that weren't quite ready for college, weren't quite ready for Division I football. Maybe they had bad grades. Maybe they had a bad family situation. But most of them weren't going to go to college. And this gave them that opportunity.
"When you give young guys opportunities like that, it changes their life. Firsthand, I would not be a business leader and community leader today, if not for that time to develop. So I'm passionate about it."
Joe Kersting, a 21-year coach who led Glendale Community College to three national junior college championships, said Crow reached out to him about the movement to reinstate football to the community colleges.
"That's our hope," Kersting said. "We're going to push hard to get those three candidates elected and hopefully they can change things.
"There already are some people on the board that I helped get there who are still there. If we can get three more people in the same direction, that's what we're hoping for."
Kersting said he is hoping that the new chancellor, Steven Bloomberg, who took over in July, would view reinstating football favorably.
"I think we just need to make some noise," Kersting said. "When you look at it, the day they eliminated football from all four programs, within a few days, Eastern Arizona, Arizona Western and Pima all dropped football, too. That's seven schools. And we had rosters of 80 players. That's over 500 athletes per year missing out on a chance to play junior college football.
"It wasn't like we weren't any good. We had national championship teams in this state many times, nationally ranked teams. The big thing is the opportunity to get an education, because so many of these guys are first-generation college students. They don't go to community college without a chance to play football."
Richard Obert has been covering high school sports since the 1980s for The Arizona Republic. Catch the best high school sports coverage in the state. Sign up for Azcentral Preps Now. And be sure to subscribe to our daily sports newsletters so you don't miss a thing. To suggest human-interest story ideas and other news, reach Obert at richard.obert@arizonarepublic.com or 602-316-8827. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter: @azc_obert
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Maricopa Community Colleges board candidates seek return of football
