SPRINT FOOTBALL

Sprint football gives college-aged players who weigh under 172 pounds a chance to still compete in football. It is played by the same rules as regular NCAA college football.
Phoenixville Area High School graduate Andrew Licwinko is a freshman at Mansfield University, which recently became the only public United States university to adopt a sprint football program.
The Mountaineers dropped their 115-year-old Division II collegiate program at the end of the 2006 season due to budgetary reasons. But there are still players on campus who desire to continue playing football.
Mansfield will start its sprint football schedule in the fall of 2008. Dan Davis was introduced as the school’s coach at a March press conference.
Sprint football may not be well-known to many people, but it has been in existence for more than 70 years. Mansfield has been accepted into the Collegiate Sprint Football League (CSFL), where it will compete with five other league members: Cornell, Penn, Princeton, Army and Navy.
Since there is a size limit, players can play multiple positions. Running backs, wide receivers, quarterbacks, tight ends, linemen, linebackers and defensive backs are almost interchangeable.
Licwinko weighs 160 pounds so he can easily make weight for sprint football. He had the same task during high school wrestling at Phoenixville, where grapplers are divided by weight classes.
This sprint football program gives Mansfield a chance to have a form of football without massive costs. The other colleges in the league have regular Division I-AA programs in the Ivy Leagued as well as the military academies besides the sprint program.
However, they are also bigger schools than Mansfield, which has just 3,000 students on campus but still wants to open its doors to prospective student-athletes who still have a goal of playing football.

Posted by
Barry Sankey