The Community College of Rhode Island, the largest community college in New England, has announced the addition of 3 new sports to its offerings: swimming, beach volleyball, and esports. All 3 will start as self-funded club sports, with hopes of boosting swimming and beach volleyball to varsity sports in coming years.
The teams will play their first seasons as club programs, with hopes of beach volleyball and swimming joining the National Junior College Athletics Association (NJCAA) as early as 2020. NJCAA swimming has been dominated for generations by Indian River in Florida, which has won 44-straight men’s and 36-straight women’s titles.
The field of swimming & diving programs in the NJCAA has been contracting this decade, including the recent cuts of programs at Daytona State College in 2013 and Darton State College in 2015. The NJCAA currently lists 15 members that sponsor men’s & women’s swimming programs. None of the 15 are located in New England, with the closest programs being in New York.
Dean of students Michael Cunningham says that the sports fit better with with the new makeup of the student body. The school says that they’ve had a “nearly 50% increase” in recent high school graduates enrolling because of the Rhode Island Promise Scholarship, and they believe that the new offerings will improve attendance at sporting events.
“This is a more traditional college-age population looking for more currently popular and traditional activities,” Cunningham said. “That 18- to 19-year-old, traditional student population was a small percentage of what we had. Now it’s a bigger percentage of what we have. We had to ask ourselves, ‘Are we offering the right set of programs and opportunities for the current student body?’ We want people to be involved. We just have to reach more students than we’ve been reaching.”
The school also sponsors:
- women’s and men’s soccer
- men’s and women’s cross country
- women’s volleyball
- women’s and men’s basketball
- men’s and women’s indoor track
- men’s and women’s outdoor track
- women’s and men’s gold
- women’s softball
- men’s baseball
Are they planning on practicing at the Newport Naval Station?
They have a pool on their campus in Lincoln.
Boo, gotta recruit with the NPT campus in mind…who could pass up the beaches and One Pelham??