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Keeping the Faith - Introduction

October 26, 2004

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It’s three days before Trinity Bible College’s biggest game of the season, and practice has started.

If only they had some footballs.

“The way I understand it,” says injured defensive lineman Dustin Nichols, “you need a football to play football.”

While the team’s twenty-five healthy players go through their stretching routines on one end of the practice field, a search party hunts for the AWOL pigskins. No one has seen the ball bag since a game three days earlier.

Assistant coaches Eric Slivoskey and Tim Rasmussen, along with Nichols, figure they are in the storage shed.

Nope.

And they weren’t left back in the locker room?

Nope.

“My son has a Nerf ball,” Slivoskey offers, adding, “I’m trying to laugh so I don’t start to cry.”

Welcome to Trinity Bible College Lions football.

The team is preparing for the penultimate game of the 2004 season. Trinity will face Principia College, which defeated Trinity in a controversial fashion one month earlier. The Lions think they have a chance to win this rematch. Some players even think it’s a game they should win. A victory would be the program’s first in three years.

Trinity made headlines and punch lines in 2003. In its first game, Rockford College defeated Trinity 105–0, setting an NCAA Division III record for most points scored in a game. The loss put Trinity on the national football map, though few fans could probably locate the school’s host town on one.

Trinity Bible College is located in Ellendale, North Dakota, a tranquil community of no stop lights, eight churches, and 1,559 people. The Pentecostal school produces preachers and missionaries, teachers and business majors. The students love their Lord, and love telling others about that love. With an enrollment of 310 students, half of them male, Trinity has the fewest students of any four-year school in the nation that fields a football team.

And that team, according to some computer rankings, is the worst in the country. The much-reviled Bowl Championship Series, which is designed to pit the two best Division I-A teams against each other for the national title, uses six computer rankings, among other criteria, to create its standings. Peter Wolfe, a California doctor and instructor at UCLA, maintains one of those computer listings. Wolfe’s formula rates all 697 NCAA, NAIA, and independent teams in the country. Trinity was ranked 697th in 2004.

Trinity’s head coach is Russell “Rusty” Bentley, a forty-one-year-old native Texan who made his collegiate coaching debut in the 105–0 defeat. Bentley arrived in Ellendale with a booming voice, a Barney Rubble laugh, and a Scripture verse for any occasion. His career record stood at 0–17 entering the Principia game.

Bentley’s coaching staff consists of three people. Offensive coordinator Eric Slivoskey earns part-time pay, but works full-time hours. Tim Rasmussen, a local youth pastor, is a former Trinity player who now serves as a volunteer coach. Brandon Strong, a twenty-one-year-old student assistant, played for Trinity in 2003. Strong would have been in pads in 2004 if not for two knees that had been ravaged the year before. Instead he helps with coaching and tapes the players’ ankles. He is also the school’s sports information director and a resident assistant in Kesler Hall on campus.

The season has been draining for the coaches and players, with injuries adding up as fast as the losses. Players question the direction of the program. They feel the team is disorganized and undisciplined. Bentley counters that the players needed to take a longer view, see that improvements, however small, are being made.

“There’s a method to my madness,” Bentley says. “I cannot treat this program like it’s a regular program. Because we’re not a liberal arts school, we’re a Bible college.”

A Bible college that could use a victory on the field. A win isn’t going to make the team’s problems disappear. In fact, some of the players are just happy the game brings them one week closer to the end of the season. But a win would restore a bit of pride. It might even make the injuries and emotional struggles seem worth it.

Several of the team’s injured players will return for the Principia game. One of them is fullback Sannon Norick, who had missed the previous game with a neck injury. Norick is in his second year with the Lions. His Trinity football career includes more concussions than victories or 100-yard rushing games.

“I never had a losing season in my career,” Norick says. “Coming to where you don’t win a game, that sucks. It rips you apart. I was letting it get to me way too much. The situation with coaching and losing all the time, I just couldn’t take it anymore. Finally I said, ‘I can’t dwell on that. Let it go.’”

Maybe a victory would help with those feelings.

Now, where are those footballs?

As the players warm up to chants of “This is our bowl week, baby,” Coach Slivoskey suggests searching for the footballs in the Pepsi trailer that doubles as a concession stand on game days. Jerry Rush, a Trinity student and former player, operates the stand, and lives in a trailer park next to the field. Nichols hobbles over to Rush’s house and retrieves the key to the stand.

He finds the footballs. The Nerf ball stays in the closet. Practice can begin.

“I think if you evaluated all 697 football programs in America,” Strong had said earlier in the week, “you wouldn’t find this situation.”

He wasn’t just talking about the team’s practices.