by Tom Robinson, The Virginian-Pilot
REMOVE RACE FROM the issue and Chowan University's move next year into the historically black CIAA for football makes total sense.
Chowan needs a home for its budding Division II football program within manageable driving distance of its opponents. The 10-member CIAA, which has lost schools such as Norfolk State and Hampton to Division I-AA, needs new blood for its health and relevancy.
It's a win-win. A logical marriage for Chowan, a private, 900-student Baptist school in northeastern North Carolina, and a Virginia-North Carolina-based conference, headquartered in Hampton.
In the real world, of course, the nuptials announced last week are landmark stuff, a barrier-breaking moment to be recognized and congratulated.
The CIAA is the country's oldest and possibly proudest "historically black conference," a label that seems quaint in 21st century college sports, where racial lines are easily blurred. But Chowan's student body is 50 percent white. It never has been and obviously never will be a historically black college.
And yet, after a back-channel courting dance that lasted the better part of a year, CIAA commissioner Leon Kerry asked and Chowan president M. Christopher White accepted the offer to help form a new reality.
"I'm not going to say it was an obvious fit, but there were a lot of pros," says Chowan's athletic director, Dennis Helsel, citing geographic and academic similarities. "And there were some negatives."
None was larger than the uncertainty of how the bold move would be perceived by supporters in both camps. To their credit, neither Chowan nor the CIAA let anything clutter the supporting evidence they'd diligently compiled.
The CIAA, Helsel says, is well aware that Chowan football has been down on its luck. The Hawks - Chowan sports are transitioning from Division III to II - snapped an 18-game losing streak two weeks ago.
Helsel, a former assistant AD at Old Dominion, knows CIAA loyalists question whether Chowan, simply on merit, deserves its invitation and can ever be "more than just a doormat" in the CIAA.
He responds as he responded to Kerry, whom Helsel calls a visionary: Chowan has firm plans to improve facilities, raise more scholarship money and generally be "a good partner" to the CIAA, with an eye toward CIAA acceptance in all sports.
Until then, Chowan's 10 other sports will remain independents in Division II.
"This is not a free pass," Helsel says. "Leon wasn't out begging. If he was going to break ground, he didn't want to break ground with someone that was going to embarrass him."
Kerry couldn't be reached Thursday to address reaction to his conference's decision. Helsel, however, says feedback that's crossed his desk is strongly positive. Negative messages he's received that do reference race, he says, haven't been overtly bigoted.
"Nobody's said, 'How dare you do what you are doing?' " Helsel says. "At least nobody's had the guts to send me something like that."
They would forget Chowan's trailblazing history. Chowan was created in Murfreesboro in 1848 as a four-year educational school for women, Helsel notes, not as a "finishing school," which was common for the day.
From the start, Helsel says, "Chowan had the vision to buck society."
Vision, plus necessity, just put Chowan back out front.
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