Trinity Lutheran adds sports

Published 12:01 am Thursday, January 27, 2011

One year after successfully debuting men’s and women’s soccer teams, Trinity Lutheran College of Everett has announced that it will add cross country and golf for men and women.

Cross country begins this fall, while golf starts in the spring of 2012.

The school is going thr

ough the process of finding coaches, which it expects to name in the coming weeks.

The decision to go ahead with cross country and golf follows the first seasons for the two soccer teams last fall. The men’s team finished with an 8-6-2 record and the women — despite playing with just eight players most of the season — went 3-5-1.

“It’s gone well,” school president John Reed said of the soccer teams. “There were just some really good responses that we got from the programs that we started. … It’s been good for our community here at Trinity.”

Cross country and golf were added, he said, because they are sports “that would not take too much to get up and running. You don’t have to go build a stadium for those sports.”

One reason for adding sports teams is a boost in student enrollment, which is “really critical for us,” Reed said. The school has approximately 170 students and would like to get its enrollment to 300, so “one of our key strategies to grow our college is to add students through athletics.”

Also, sports teams help give additional exposure to the school, he said.

The media “might not write about a neat paper that was read in a psychology class,” Reed said. “But sports for sure (get that attention), especially if there are local kids involved.”

Trinity Lutheran currently competes as part of the National Christian College Athletic Association (NCCAA), but Reed envisions the school eventually joining the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), “which has a much broader pool of schools,” he said. “It might take us a couple of years, but we’re not in any big hurry.”

Also in the future, Reed would like to see Trinity Lutheran add additional sports, most likely baseball for men and volleyball for women. And there are plans to add crew as a club sport, he said.