The community of Pea Ridge will be represented well this fall in venues beyond northwest Arkansas as four recent graduates are strapping on the gear for as many di◊erent colleges for the 2013 football season.
Tailback Dayton Winn, lineman Blake Roughton and defensive stalwarts Dalton Morgan and Jonah Torres have all left the area to begin their freshmen years in states far and near. Winn is staying in Arkansas to take the fi eld with Hendrix College’s fi rst Warrior football team in over half a century while Torres will be playing as far west as you can go, competing for the Santa Barbara CityCollege Vaqueros on the Pacifi c coast in California. Meanwhile, the other two former ’Hawks will battle each other this fall as Morgan suits up for the Missouri Southern State University Lions with Roughton taking the fi eld as a Bearcat from Southwest Baptist University.
All four will be undertaking building or rebuilding tasks for the upcoming season as members of their respective teams.
Hendrix will be fielding a team for the first time in over 60 years with only four of the players even on campus last spring. With no spring ball to prepare for the fall campaign, the Warriors will have 20 practices to learn everything they need to know before jumping into the fire of a full season of collegiate football. Winn’s experience of playing with a sophomore Blackhawk class that had few experienced upperclassmen will serve him well in this new challenge.
Hendrix plays in the Southern Athletic Association, a league consisting of a bunch of really oldschools from across the south.
Conference members include: the Centre College Colonels (Ky.), the Rhodes College Lynx (Tenn.), the Birmingham Southern Panthers (Ala.), the Sewanee University Tigers (Tenn.), the Oglethorpe College Stormy Petrels (Ga.), the Millsaps College majors, and the Berry College Vikings (Ga.). Millsaps, Hendrix, and Berry are the only colleges not founded before the Civil War. The oldest is Centre College which began operations in 1819.
While Hendrix in Conway is not a real far place to go for home games, Winn’s folks will be burning the gas if they take in all theout of town games the Warriors play. While six of the teams’ 10 games are at home, they will have to travel to Birmingham, Ala.;
Jackson, Miss.; Sherman, Texas;
and Danville, Ky., for the road battles. Of course, they will be taking in the Pea Ridge games on Friday nights to watch younger brother, but if they left as soon as those games ended, they could make it to the college games with minutes to spare.
Roughton (Missouri Southern) and Morgan (Southwest Baptist) will be playing in the Missouri Intercollegiate Athletic Association,a 14-collegiate sports organization with nearly half the schools, oddly enough, not from Missouri. When I was growing up, the MIAA was made of just colleges and universities in Missouri. Of course, with two Texas schools (SMU and Houston) now members of the Big East Conference with the Big 10 Conference having more than 10 colleges in it, I guess logic and rational thought isn’t always a big thing with college sports these days.
MIAA schools besides the two previously mentioned include Central Missouri University, University of Central Oklahoma, Emporia State University, Fort Hays State University, Lincoln University, Lindenwood College, Missouri Western State University, Nebraska University at Kearney, Northwest Missouri State University, Washburn University and Pittsburg State University.
Both MSSU and SBU are ranked in the lower half of the conference for the 2013 season according to a coaches poll. MSSC is coming o◊a 5-5 season, with SBU hoping to improve on their 3-8 mark of a year ago. The two schools will tangle with each other on Sept. 28 with the MSSU Lions going to Bolivar for an early league test. Southwest Baptist, although having the lesser record of the two teams a year ago, nonetheless was victorious over their closest foe by a 16-13 count in 2012.
The player whom I would really like to see play in person would have to be Torres. The Santa Barbara City College Vaqueros have the nicest stadium which is situated right on the Pacific Ocean. Having spent some time myself in Santa Barbara many years ago, I could really see myself tailgating outside the stadium whilst swimming in the surf of a sandy beach. I think I will check with The TIMES management to get me a ticket out west to cover one (or more) of Torres home games.
The SBCC Vaqueros play in an eight-team division of the Southern California Football Association. Other teams include the AntelopeValley Marauders; the Los Angeles Valley Monarchs;
the Los Angeles Southwest Cougars; the Los Angeles Pierce Bulls; the Glendale Vaqueros; the West Los Angeles Wildcats; and the Santa Monica Corsairs. These teams are all bunched around Los Angeles with Santa Barbara the northern most team in that division.
The SCFA has four divisions with 37 colleges as members. The SCFA is a part of the larger California Community College Conference which has 110 member colleges across the length and breadth of the state. None of the schools belong to either the NCAA or NAIA but with their large membership, they do compete in overall championships in a variety of sports and have a number of bowl games at the end of the football season pitting the best teams from across the state.
Like his fellow former Blackhawks, Torres is playing for a team that didn’t have a winning season previously but has high hopes of better things in the future. With all four of these former Friday night heroes, they have all faced adversity in their careers but know what if feels like to overcome the odds and eventually become winners.
Over a million high school boys play high school football with very few of that number actually getting to pay at the collegiate level. With college rosters dominated by players from the bigger high school programs across the nation, the number of collegiate football players from the smaller high schools is an exceedingly small percentage. For Pea Ridge to be able to boast of four players making the jump to the next level in the same year says a lot about the quality of the program here.
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Editor’s note: John McGee is an award-winning columnist and sports writer. He is the art teacher at Pea Ridge elementary schools, coaches elementary track and writes a regular sports column for The Times. He can be contacted through The Times at [email protected].
Sports, Pages 7 on 08/14/2013