Intercollegiate Football Back at Santa Barbara : After 15-Year Absence, the Gauchos Return With a No-Scholarship Team

Fifteen years ago last Thursday, UC Santa Barbara opened its football season at Washington, and the Gauchos silenced a capacity crowd of 56,000 by taking the opening kickoff and putting together a flawless drive to score a touchdown.

But that was the first and last bit of excitement for the upstart Gauchos that day. Led by quarterback Sonny Sixkiller, the Huskies turned the game around in a hurry and rolled to a 63-7 victory.

Things didn’t improve the following Saturday when the Gauchos traveled to Tennessee and were defeated, 48-6, by the Volunteers before a crowd of 60,114.

And so it went. The Gauchos won only three games that season, beating Pacific, Cal State Los Angeles and Santa Clara. Their final game was a 55-10 loss to San Jose State on Nov. 27.

A year earlier, UCSB had decided to go from the college division level to the university division. The Gauchos began awarding football scholarships, but the results were disastrous. They were 2-9 in 1970 and 3-8 the next year.

After the 1971 season, it was announced that the football program at UCSB was being abolished because there wasn’t enough community support or student interest to warrant the continuation of university funds at that level.

So football at UCSB became an intramural affair until the fall of 1983, when it was resurrected at the club level by a group of students who begged, borrowed and raised the money to get the team started.

The ball really got rolling in April of 1985 when a budget of about $65,000 came from students voting to increase their own fees.

And now, the sport is all the way back, but with a significant difference from 1971. The Gauchos played their first official game in nearly 15 years last Saturday night. No, the opponent wasn’t Washington or Tennessee. UCSB, now a member of the NCAA Division III and a team with no football scholarships, played at Redlands.

Mike Warren, a starting UCSB linebacker in 1966-67--before football scholarships were awarded at the school--and a successful head coach at the high school level for 14 years (his teams were 128-34-4), was hired as the Gauchos’ coach last fall.

He took the job with the hope that the program would go from the club level to the intercollegiate level but without any such guarantee.

The decision to go intercollegiate was made by the school last April and the Gauchos were certified by the NCAA as a Division III school in July.

“I’m right where I want to be,” Warren, 41, said. “I’m living a dream. This is me, this is my place, this is all everything I’ve wanted to do with athletics.”

Warren played under Jack Curtice, UCSB’s head coach from 1963-69. Curtice, who had previously been the head coach at Utah and Stanford, retired after the 1969 season and was succeeded by Andy Everest, most recently an assistant coach for the NFL’s New Orleans Saints from 1981-85.

Everest was the coach when the program was abandoned. But that was 15 years ago. Things are different now.

“We contacted over 1,000 recruits last spring and over 500 of them visited our campus,” Warren said. “About half of them applied to school, and about half of those who applied were accepted.

“They were all regularly qualified students of the university admitted with no special action. A freshman had to have at least a 1,000 score on the SAT and a 3.1 grade-point average.”

A year ago, 28 players turned out for the first day of practice. Late last month, Warren had to cut the squad from 112 to 75 on the first day of practice because only 75 uniforms were available.

“We have about the same kind of personnel I remember us having when I played here,” Warren said, adding that 17 players from last year’s team were members of this year’s squad.

What are Warren’s goals for the season?

“I think the most important thing we need to do is to represent the university well,” he said. “That has many intangibles. I think we need to play football well, that goes without saying, and I think we will.

“I’m talking about student-athletes, in that order. They were admitted as students, they are going to graduate, they will go on to successful careers as a result of their education and they are also good football players.

“Football will be a meaningful part of their total college experience, just like it was when Coach Curtice used to talk to us along those lines daily.”

Warren believes some of the super powers could learn a lesson from the way things are handled at the NCAA Division III level.

“In my opinion, the very best Division I programs have the same philosophy (as NCAA Division III),” he said. “It’s the ones that don’t that make everybody look bad.

“Division III schools have in common that they have no athletic scholarships, no spring practice, and most of them have high academic and admissions requirements. You’ve got to be smart.”