News
DCB, Logrollers work to strike right balance
Matthew Semisch
01/13/2015
All athletic programs at colleges and universities of all sizes have plenty of common goals. One of those involves representing to the fullest the communities each institution serves.
Much of making that happen involves schools’ recruiting practices. Each college sports team wants to attract not only the most talented student-athletes it can but also make sure that much of that talent is from the school’s local area.
The seven teams that make up the athletic department at Dakota College at Bottineau (DCB) are no different in that regard. What allows DCB’s teams to make that happen are the Logrollers, the school’s athletic booster organization.
The Logrollers, a group that began life in 1975 when DCB was known as North Dakota State University-Bottineau, raises more than $80,000 per year. Most of that money is used by five of DCB’s sports teams in the form of scholarships.
“We know where our bread is buttered; the bread, the butter and the jelly,” said Brandon Colvin, DCB’s director of athletics and men’s basketball coach. “Anything the Logrollers need help with, we help them because they are a lifeline to the athletic department as scholarships go.
“All scholarship money comes through that organization, so we need to be as active as possible with them. Without the Logrollers, we’d be NJCAA Division III, scholarship money would be nonexistent and the athletic department would be nothing like it is.”
DCB’s football and softball teams are the only teams that don’t offer scholarships.
The Lumberjacks football program doesn’t offer scholarships due to the size of the team’s roster in any given year. Ahead of the start of the 2014 football season, 130 players arrived in Bottineau hoping to play for DCB.
DCB is not the only junior college that doesn’t offer football players scholarships. Most of the country’s junior college football programs don’t, apart from those in conferences in a select few states such as Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi and Texas.
No team belonging to the National Junior College Athletic Association’s (NJCAA) Division III classification receives scholarship money. The Ladyjacks softball team is the only Division III group at DCB.
The school’s baseball, volleyball and men’s and women’s basketball teams are all Division II. The NJCAA has only one divisional classification for both football and hockey.
Over the course of the 2013-14 academic year, scholarship allocation from the Logrollers to DCB’s teams was as follows:
• Baseball: $5,700
• Hockey: $16,860
• Men’s basketball: $19,908
• Women’s basketball: $18,466
• Volleyball: $9,810
STRIVING FOR SUSTAINABILITY
Not every junior college has a booster club as well-established as DCB’s. For example, Minnesota State Community and Technical College, Colvin’s most previous stop in his career before he arrived in Bottineau last summer, had no such organization in place.
Dr. Ken Grosz, DCB’s Campus Dean since 2001, has been at the college since 1975 when he became its director of student affairs. For as long as the Logrollers have been active, Grosz has had an active interest.
Before the Logrollers organization came into being, the college had what was referred to as an athletics promotions committee. That committee helped attract student-athletes to what was then NDSU-Bottineau, but the group wasn’t as organized as the Logrollers.
Grosz prefers not to picture how DCB’s athletic department might operate if it weren’t for the launch of the Logrollers.
“It really would be very, very difficult for the college’s athletic department to operate if not for the Logrollers,” Grosz said.
“They’ve been very active especially over the past 15 to 20 years, and we’ve had some very dynamic presidents of it that have come in and gotten the organization rolling, and we have a very dynamic one right now in Dennis Lagasse.”
Lagasee, formerly of Rolette but who moved to Bottineau 25 years ago, has been the president of the Logrollers for the past five years.
“We want to support and recruit athletes to the college that can make us competitive and fill out our team rosters with highly-talented kids,” Grosz said. “Without the Logrollers and people in there like Dennis, it would be much more difficult to make that happen.”
THE RIGHT BALANCE
All parties involved know that fielding both locally-raised talent and the best of what DCB can get elsewhere is important. Doing so is, was and always will be a continuing process.
Most DCB student-athletes aren’t from North Dakota. Landing homegrown talent, it appears, is doable but difficult.
“We give scholarship money to the athletic programs to recruit the best talent possible,” Lagasse said, “and hopefully that includes a mix of local kids and kids from further away, but they struggle to get local kids.
“Every school in North Dakota is after North Dakota kids right along with DCB, and that can be a challenge, but our coaches go after what is out there really well.”
DCB and the Logrollers are hoping to also cast their net out further to grow the Lumberjacks’ and Ladyjacks’ fan base. Both entities are hoping to reach out to not only supporters in the Bottineau area but also to those further afield that have DCB ties.