By Carroll Leggett

Reprinted with the permission of Metro Magazine

Campbell University hasn't had a football team in 56 years, but it is getting ready to change that. Its announcement in April of last year that it would field a team in 2008 shocked the sports community. And the speed with which it has proceeded to develop a program and build the first phase of a stadium has been little short of astounding.

More than 100 young men showed up for practice this fall, and for sure when the Campbell team hits the field for its first game on Saturday, August 30, 2008, against Birmingham-Southern, it will have a strong Down East flavor. Campbell, which still has strong ties to the Baptist denomination, took to heart the Biblical admonition to not hide one's light under a bushel. Its playing field will be adjacent to the campus and squarely beside Highway 421 in a location that I remember from my childhood as tobacco fields, pastures and plum thickets.

Road builders, in their wisdom, decided it was time to bypass the metropolis of Buies Creek (population 200 plus) when I was a youngster, cutting a broad, ugly gash through the familiar countryside, silting the creek where we had fished and separating our house from the homes of friends like Larry Stewart, Jimmy Baker, Embert and Fordyce Page, and Buddy Brown, whose mother was the community cake lady. We were always excited when mother announced she had asked Edna Brown to bake a cake for her. It was usually a four-layer coconut cake with pineapple between the layers and lots of frosting. Almost always it meant company was coming.

After the new road was built, when you tossed and turned on hot summer nights and prayed for a breeze to come through an open window, you could hear the cars as east-west travelers made their way to places east like Carolina Beach, where 421 ends, or Boone in the west and on over the mountains into Tennessee. You could hear the roar of the transfer trucks, and I often lay awake and wondered what sort of people had business that required them to speed by in their cars in the dead of the night.

Knowing that starting a football program is an expensive undertaking, I asked Dr. Jerry Wallace, Campbell's president, what the thinking was. Dr. Wallace, who is taking bold steps on a number of fronts to ensure a bright future for the University, suited up once or twice for East Carolina and loves the game. I was surprised at his answer.

"The return of football to Campbell is primarily the result of continuing requests from students." Every homecoming, he said, students would ask, "When can we have football?"

"The truth is," said Dr. Wallace, "homecoming at a North Carolina college without football is incomplete. We want to have a campus experience that generates excitement and pride in being a Campbell student and graduate. Football is a missing ingredient that nothing else can replace."

Well spoken. Dr. Wallace is no dummy. Year after year, he has seen homecomings with just a sprinkling of alumni — usually old-timers showing up 50 years after graduation to get their Golden Key pins and see if the years have treated them better than their classmates.

I graduated from Campbell in 1963, and between you and me, there has not been a meaningful gathering of my classmates in 44 years. This is astounding when you consider the fact that we were Campbell College's first four-year graduates as it made the transition from a junior college. We were a small but enthusiastic band of close-knit students who passed up opportunities to attend established universities to be pioneers at Campbell, which I have never regretted.

Maybe football, along with outreach efforts Dr. Wallace is initiating, is the answer. It has pretty well been proven that inviting alumni to the campus for punch and cookies on an October afternoon isn't.

I have waited awhile to tell you why I have followed the rebirth of football at Campbell so closely. As a 7-year-old, I went to Buies Creek, along with my mother and older brother, to live for awhile with my uncle and aunt, Earl and Stella Smith. Earl Smith, an outstanding athlete first at Campbell and then East Carolina, was the football coach — the last football coach before football was abandoned in 1951.

On cool fall days, I left school in the afternoon, dropped my books off at the two-story white house just across the street that we shared with Diamond and M.B. Matthews, and headed to the football field, which was just a few hundred yards away. My Uncle Earl — now past 90 and living in Fayetteville — reminded me just last week that I would perch on the heavy leather dummies and watch the practice until they were needed for tackling or blocking practice. Then to regain my dignity after being shooed away, I would walk over to the water bucket and take a big drink from the players' dipper, he said. That was no Gatorade.

The decision to revive the football program in 1946 after the boys came home from the war was a sudden one. In mid-summer, Dr. Leslie Campbell, then president of Campbell College and a rare gentleman, asked my Uncle Earl whether he could field a football team that fall.

Hired as a physical education teacher, he already was coaching baseball, basketball, track, cross country, tennis and golf. He said, "Sure," and when school started, he had rounded up more than 40 players — an amazing feat at a college with just a few hundred students — and almost all of them were veterans just back from the Great War.

Somehow Coach Smith scrounged enough equipment to begin practice. Dunn High School loaned Campbell a few bleachers for the football field that was located that first year where the Buies Creek Public School is now. When the season opened, the team still had no uniforms and played their first three games in practice gear.

They dressed and stored their meager equipment across the campus in an old wooden gymnasium that was heated with four coal stoves placed strategically by the basketball court and two in the locker rooms below. I never remember seeing a ball hit one of the stoves during a basketball game, but I am sure it must have happened. There were nights when the gym was so cold you had to bundle up like you were going to a football game. If you are wondering why the place didn't burn down, well, eventually it did, but long after it had been replaced by Carter Gymnasium, which is now being replaced by the John W. Pope Jr. Convocation Center.

Campbell's first opponent in 1946 was Pembroke, of which Earl Smith says the fledgling Campbell team gave a 62-0 "whupping." Other opponents included Belmont Abbey, Brevard, Lees McRae, Mars Hill, Edwards Military Academy (EMI), and Presbyterian Junior College (PJC).

It is remarkable that the man who coached Campbell's last football team is still around. I can tell you that his mind is sharp as a tack, He is a member of the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame and a walking sports history book. He left Campbell in 1951 for a successful career at East Carolina, where he coached both basketball and baseball, winning four successive Southern Conference championships.

When Campbell announced the resumption of football after more than a half century, Earl Smith, as well as several of the players he coached, were there to express support: Bob Greason, Thomasville; Willard Harris, Chapel Hill; Dick Pope, Raleigh; Bill Julian, Fayetteville; Bobby Rouse, LaGrange; Joe Bateman, Burlington; and Gene Bowen, Southern Pines.

Coach Dale Steele tells me Campbell has applied for membership in the non-scholarship Pioneer Football League, the new FCS Division, which previously was referred to as Division I-AA.

Starting in 2008, "The Fighting Camels" will take the field against teams including Davidson, Drake, San Diego, Jacksonville, Valparaiso, Butler, Dayton and Morehead State. Steele brings a wealth of experience to Campbell, including stints at ECU, Baylor, Elon, East Tennessee, and Down East at Northern Nash Senior High.

My Uncle Earl says he will be in Buies Creek for Campbell's first game a year from now. I have promised him I will be there, too. There is almost as much joyful anticipation about that game and "tailgating" in Baptist Hollow as there is about the second coming. Fact is, as to football, you might say this is the third coming.