Johnson C. Smith football eyes potential Division II playoff berth after historic season
For most of the past 50 years, the football team’s record at Johnson C. Smith has been ...
“Dismal,” offered Tom Baldwin, a proud alum of the school and a member of the 1969 JCSU team that remains one of the most famous football squads in school history. “That’s a pretty good word for it.”
The Golden Bulls just couldn’t get it together, year after year, often winning two or three games in an entire season. J.C. Smith fans would go to homecoming in Charlotte each year, dress in blue and gold and expect to have a great time, but rarely expect to actually win the game.
This year, though, has been different. J.C. Smith finished its regular season last week with an 8-2 record and has a legitimate chance to make the NCAA’s Division II football playoffs for the first time.
The 28-team national bracket will be announced Sunday, and the Golden Bulls are on the bubble. The team plans to hold an on-campus watch party and hope for the best. A first-round matchup at Wingate (likely to make it, as is Lenoir-Rhyne) might be possible, but Johnson C. Smith needs the right teams to win and lose on Saturday in various other games. If Johnson C. Smith doesn’t make the playoffs, its season will be over but still historic.
“I think our chances at making the playoffs are better than 50-50,” J.C. Smith head coach Maurice Flowers said. “Our strength of schedule and number of quality wins should help us — both are the best in the CIAA. We are practicing this week with the hopes that we’ll be playing in the school’s first Division II playoff game soon.”
‘If we can win in football’
The playoff bid remains possible even though J.C. Smith didn’t win the CIAA conference championship and failed to make Saturday’s title game at all due to sustaining losses in each of its final two games after a sizzling 8-0 start. In a scheduling oddity, the Golden Bulls actually beat both of the teams who did qualify for the CIAA title game — Virginia State and Virginia Union.
But even if they don’t make the playoffs and this season turns out to be finished, there’s no doubt the Golden Bulls still ended up with a significant year that has changed some things at the school.
Said JCSU president Valerie Kinloch of what the football team’s eight straight wins to begin the season did for the campus: “It enhanced a sense of belonging. ... When you are winning, it feels as if now we are unstoppable, and not just with football. If we can win in football, we can win in all of our other sports and we can also win in the classroom. And that just bleeds over into the reality that when we can get that done right, and we can enhance our academics done right, and we can drive up alumni giving and alumni participation.”
Founded in 1867 by two reverends to educate formerly enslaved Black people, Johnson C. Smith currently has 1,306 students enrolled. That’s an increase of about 200 students since Kinloch became president in August 2023, the school said.
And about 10% of the student body actually suits up for the football team. Including walk-ons, Flowers said he has about 125 players on the roster.
Flowers and Kinloch are both JCSU alums themselves, and they agreed early on that putting some more emphasis and dollars into the football program would provide benefits to the school as a whole.
“The maximum number of scholarships for all Division II football programs is 36 per year,” Flowers said. “When I got here (in January 2022), we were at about 23 or 24. And now, we’re right near the maximum, having added a few more every year.”
Those scholarships are often cut into halves or quarters and distributed among even more players, with the result being that Flowers can provide at least some funding to many of the 125 student-athletes on the team (and they sometimes get need-based academic financial aid as well). With more football scholarship money, he and his staff have also been able to recruit better talent.
“When I was here in the late 1980s playing quarterback,” Flowers said, “we didn’t win much. And once I got out and got into coaching, it was easy to see that we didn’t have enough full-time coaches, enough scholarships or the facilities to compete with the other top teams in the conference. ... Now, with lots of help, we’ve added a top-of-the-line weight room, a new turf field, more scholarships and more full-time coaches. And because of all that, we are able to climb the ladder.”
Improved JCSU attendance
JCSU athletic director Denisha Hendricks said that attendance at football games this year has improved, averaging about 3,500 to 4,000.
“And for homecoming, we were completely sold out,” Hendricks said. “We brought in extra seats and were able to hold a little under 6,000. Every seat was sold, and that hasn’t happened in many years. The team’s success has brought all kinds of positive attention to the institution. We have more opportunities to tell our story and to help people understand that they should invest in the good things that are happening at the institution.”
J.C. Smith’s football team has had some good years. A number of those came in the 1960s and 1970s under legendary coach Eddie McGirt. Baldwin was a defensive tackle on what is still the last Golden Bulls team to win the CIAA, in 1969.
Baldwin still has the watch that players received for that conference title, and it still works “after a couple of repairs,” Baldwin laughed.
Later, Baldwin became a banker and was one of the men who spearheaded a fund drive from the “1969ers” to raise money for the current football program — that fundraising secured more than $100,000 in donations a few years ago.
“Coach Flowers reminds me a lot of Coach McGirt,” Baldwin said. “He’s tough and he’s fair. And what’s happening now, I don’t see this just from a sports standpoint. I think a good football team has an impact on the morale of the university as a whole.”
“We’re a relatively small HBCU,” said Wanda Foy-Burroughs, JCSU’s director of alumni relations. “But something like this year’s football team really does get our alumni inspired, and it absolutely helps us in a lot of ways.”
Kinloch, the school’s president, knows that academics are the serious business for any college experience and that sports, ultimately, are one of the fun parts. But she’s not afraid to embrace the fun.
After the Johnson C. Smith homecoming parade in October, Kinloch decided that a nearby double dutch jump rope exhibition looked like a blast. Never mind that she hadn’t tried to double dutch in more than a decade. She had learned to do so growing up in Charleston, and she had a hankering to do it again.
“I decided I wanted next,” Kinloch said, laughing. “And some of my team members said to me, ‘President Kinloch, can you not do this? We’re in public.’ But I got in. ... And I’m going to have to start remembering that everyone films everything now.”
The resulting video of Kinloch effortlessly navigating two jump ropes swinging in opposite directions went viral in the Johnson C. Smith community and is probably as good an example as any of what the Golden Bulls community is feeling about the 2024 football season. And it was also an example of one person’s transformation — the sort that the Golden Bulls want for every student.
“I was this kind of shy girl when I went here,” said Kinloch, who graduated from JCSU in 1996. “And now I’m the president of the university where I was once the shy girl. ... And that’s what we want for all our students: Something more. To see the joy on people’s faces seeing our band, and our students, and our football team that’s competitive and has a combined 3.2 grade-point average — people are just talking about us more now. It’s all interconnected.”
This story was originally published November 13, 2024 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Johnson C. Smith football eyes potential Division II playoff berth after historic season."
