Courtesy of Ace Hunt/MSFL)
IT BEING a Saturday, the hallway of West Vigo High School was an empty echo chamber. On an overcast but temperate November afternoon in West Terre Haute, fans and students tailgated outside in the school’s parking lot. There was music, laughter, and food. But inside, the school remained quiet.
Dressed in very little, a group of young men formed a line down the corridor. At the end of the human chain was an electric scale. One by one, the young men stepped on and waited for the numbers to take shape on the scale’s display. Some of them made weight with breezy indifference while others appeared less confident.
Ultimately, despite a few tense moments, everyone came in under the 190-pound limit and was permitted to suit up. These weren’t high school wrestlers but collegiate sprint football players, and it was championship Saturday in Indiana.
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Though sprint football only recently spread to the Midwest, it has been played at New England institutions since 1934. Jimmy Carter played for the U.S. Naval Academy’s team in the 1940s. Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, played for Columbia and Donald Rumsfeld for Princeton.
The sport has all the same rules as traditional football with the major exception of the player weight requirement, which has crept upward over time from the initial 150-pound maximum to 190 pounds in 2024. For high school stars simply lacking the frame and stature to draw interest from traditional football programs, sprint football offers an avenue for them to enjoy a post-secondary athletic career.
“It gives kids another avenue to be able to play,” explains Saint Mary-of-the-Woods head coach Blaine Powell. “And we carry a smaller roster. … We set our limit at about 70 to 75, so when these kids step foot on campus, they’re competing to be on the field now.”
Courtesy of Ace Hunt/MSFL)
Sprint football made its debut outside the East Coast in fall of 2022, when a group of small Midwestern universities, including Fontbonne University in Missouri, Quincy University in Illinois, Bellarmine and Midway Universities in Kentucky, and Calumet College of St. Joseph and Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College in Indiana, brought the game to their campuses to boost enrollment and kicked off the first season of the Midwest Sprint Football League. Both Saint Mary-of-the-Woods and Calumet College of St. Joseph have total enrollments of less than 1,000, so adding roughly 70 student athletes was an attractive prospect.
Both schools began to pull ahead of the pack almost immediately. Recruiting largely from their surrounding areas and using local high school facilities as their home venues, the two programs dominated the inaugural regular season and met in the first-ever MSFL championship game. Playing on Calumet’s home field at Whiting High School on the banks of Lake Michigan, Saint Mary-of-the-Woods avenged a regular season loss to Calumet’s Crimson Wave two weeks prior and claimed the first league trophy.
In 2023, a third Indiana school, Oakland City University, joined the MSFL. League commissioner Ron Prettyman’s goal is to continue to expand to 12 teams across two divisions, with the winners meeting for the league championship. He also wants to build a relationship between the MSFL and New England’s Collegiate Sprint Football League, the the only other collegiate sprint league in the country. Prettyman envisions one day creating a national championship game between the winners of the two leagues.
“They’ve been very cooperative and supportive of us,” says Prettyman. “Our whole constitution and bylaws and rules were founded and based on their documents. We’ve tweaked them somewhat to accommodate some of the desires of our council of presidents, but for the most part, that foundation is very, very similar to the Midwest Sprint Football League.”
Courtesy of Ace Hunt/MSFL)
For now, it’s looking like Indiana’s teams are the two to beat in the MSFL. In 2023, Calumet defeated Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, giving the programs one title apiece at the start of the 2024 season. They met again in the finals this past November, with Saint Mary of the Woods at 20-3 over all three seasons—two of the three losses to Calumet. At 17-6, Calumet owed four of its six losses to Saint Mary-of-the-Woods.
With a crowd of nearly 2,000 looking on, Calumet piled up 226 team rushing yards and never trailed en route to its 38-13 victory and its second MSFL title. Following the awards presentation, the players changed clothes and loaded onto the bus. It was a roughly three-hour drive home from West Terre Haute to Whiting, but the team had an important stop to make first. Their final weigh-in of the season was behind them, and a visit to Little Caesars was in order.
