The Administrative Response
In order to fully understand how Tiger Fever at was not able to permeate the Trinity community, we can look to the administrative response throughout the 1980s. At the beginning of the 1980s, the Trinity University Tigers were taking on a new conference, the Texas Intercollegiate Athletic Association. This conference did not welcome them kindly, and the Tigers found it difficult to compete. The student body also took note of this as opinions clashed over the hosting of homecoming the weekend of an out of town football game. In an editorial written by two students with opposing views on the matter, Dorian Martin asserted that homecoming “just isn’t what it’s meant to be” without the traditional football game. However, Rich Lindner explained in that same editorial piece, taking the side against those pushing for a reschedule of homecoming festivities, that the football team is not “viable nor competitive,” along with a myriad of other reasons, and that the game simply doesn’t draw many alumni back to Trinity. I beleive Rich was right in this case, as even today Trinity has scheduled Alumni Weekend on the same weekend as an away football game.
To further support Rich’s claim, I was able to find a 1982 NCAA Division II & Division III Football Championships Availability Questionnaire signed and approved by President Calgaard. This document indicated Trinity’s intent to play for the Division II or Division III championship, its willingness to host a first round or semifinal playoff game, and its assessment of the field, capacity, and average attendance. In this formal letter to the NCAA, President Calgaard gives clear documentation that the average home attendance at Trinity football games was 1,500, but their stadium capacity was at 6,272. This means that on any given Saturday leading up to 1982, the football team played in front of a stadium that was less than a quarter full. This information does not bode well for Trinity’s Tiger Pride during this time. It does, however, seem to be a clear effort by the athletic department to bring more exciting games to Trinity University and possibly pique the interest of many students.
An internal audit of Trinity University’s Intercollegiate Athletic Programs shed more light on this issue, as it provided the revenues and expenditures for the year ended May 31, 1986. The statement lists the current operating revenues for the largest varsity sports programs. According to this document, tennis, basketball, and football were the programs that received the most institutional appropriations, respectively. Interestingly enough, tennis actually received about one and a half times more institutional appropriations than all of the other sports combined, and over five times the amount of institutional appropriations than football and basketball, individually. Clearly, football was not the administration main focus, and although tennis was the most successful program, President Calgaard did not show much interest in making other sports into Division I or Division II contenders even though tennis was his biggest asset.
This claim is supported by a letter from President Calgaard to President Roy Schilling of Southwestern University. In the letter, Calgaard decides not to attend a meeting regarding the formation of a new athletic conference. He stated that the majority of the teams attending the meeting desired to form a new athletic conference to compete at the Division II level, and that Trinity, after a “careful review of [Trinity’s] intercollegiate athletic program,” will remain nationally competitive at the Division I level for men’s and women’s tennis and keep all other sports in the Division III framework.
He also mentioned that Trinity would continue to have a non-scholarship football program as long as “it is possible for [Trinity] to sustain a viable program at this level of competition” (pg number). This move seems contradictory to the movement towards driving more fan attendance at varsity games. I presume that a higher level of competition would have bred a higher level of interest and a better on-field product with the ability to use partial scholarships in the Division II model. Conversely, this could have been a strategic move to keep Trinity athletics rooted in the Trinity community, and not about winning, losing, or dominating a certain opponent or league.