This week is quite a whirlwind for Birmingham Southern College. On the one hand, it’s baseball team has advanced to the eight-team championship bracket of the Division III Baseball World Series and will play its opening game against Salve-Regina this Friday. On the other hand, Birmingham Southern College will official and permanently shut down due to a longstanding and unsustainable financial crisis. That closure is also happening this Friday. And should Birmingham Southern win the entire series, they would be awarded a trophy for which there is no longer a case. It is oddly similar to the storyline of Will Ferrell’s Semi Pro if the Flint Tropics were a college.
There’s been a lot of conversation about college sports this past week, mainly focused on the potential solvency of teams after an NCAA settlement that will cost universities billions in past and future player payouts. But virtually all of that discussion is about Division I sports, the stuff we watch on television at schools with brand names with players that keep agents on retainer. That’s a lot different than what happens at Birmingham Southern, a school that plays in non-scholarship Division III where sports generate revenue through increased enrollment, not TV. Some Division I schools are considering cutting non-revenue sports to keep from losing money. In Division III, all sports are non-revenue, and cutting one means fewer students paying tuition to be there. In Division I, we might see the end of walk-on athletes. Everyone is technically a walk-on in Division III. So when you consider the plight of Birmingham Southern baseball, you have to change your mindset.
Birmingham Southern is one of list of colleges that have or will shut down in recent times. This year we’ll see around 20 close its doors, a significant percentage from the Northeast. The year before was about the same, and it seems like we’ll have a steady drumbeat up to the anticipated enrollment cliff in 2026, when who knows what’ll happen. Whereas universities often thought first and foremost about curriculum and course catalogues, now it’s all eyes on enrollment strategies and targeted recruiting. It’s how to convince a potentially shrinking number of college bound high school seniors to choose your campus for the next four years.
One of the ways to do that, especially for small private colleges that have to compete with their larger and often more affordable public brethren, is sports. What’s the fastest growing place for college football? Division III. Because a college football team might mean an extra 100 tuition paying students on campus and, not for nothing, might be one of the few stopgaps in the growing gender divide in college attendance. So while Alvernia University may only have 1500 undergraduates, adding a football team in 2018 made sure 100 wouldn’t be going anywhere. Same with Hilbert College, where starting in 2023, about 1 in 8 students are likely football players. Division III sports isn’t what we often consider in the national rhetoric around college athletics. Yet it’s hard to imagine campuses where sports and life are more interwoven and academics and athletics are more co-dependent than those in D3.
Which brings us back to the soon to be defunct Birmingham Southern baseball team, an important part of the soon to be defunct Birmingham Southern College. What does it mean for these players, on the cusp of one of the greatest moments of their lives, to know this isn’t just their last baseball game for Birmingham, but the last anything for Birmingham? Perhaps in some odd way, it might serve as reminder that unlike the growing vernacular about big time college sports, a professional entity simply sharing space and a logo with its home institution, for place like Birmingham Southern, it’s simply not so. For a whole lot of college athletes, being a student and an athlete are not nearly as disparate as one would be led to believe. And in fact, they simply do not exist without each other. And that when a college shuts down, as many more will do, it’s not simply the math and biology departments that go away. It’s all the rest of the campus connective tissue that dies with it, including sports. It’s something college presidents should consider when using sports as a Hail Mary enrollment savior, especially when you try to convince a kid to bring their talents to your fields and courts.
For now, Birmingham Southern baseball players can take solace in the fact that they still have some games to play. Even if college is truly over.
Keith Strudler is the director of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler
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