Charlie Davis celebrates in the background as his teammate get a defensive stop in Roanoke's 21-20 win against Guilford this past weekend. Roanoke athletics photo

By Brian Lester
D3sports.com

Roanoke College football coach Bryan Stinespring is asked what it has been like going through the first season as a program.

He responds by asking how long he has to talk, and that’s understandable, as a lot has gone into the Maroons’ first actual year of varsity football on campus since World War II.

Stinespring has been coaching in college football for nearly 40 years, with the majority of those spent at Virginia Tech, and so he’s been a part of a lot of big moments. But this experience has been maybe his favorite.

“It’s been the single greatest undertaking I’ve ever been a part of,” Stinespring said. “It’s one of the most difficult challenges, if not the most difficult challenge, I’ve ever been a part of, and yet, it’s the most rewarding I’ve ever been a part of.”

It’s hard to have any complaints. The Maroons are 5-3 with two games to go and have a shot to finish with a winning record. 

Linebacker Charlie Davis, who has 90 tackles on the year to help lead the defense, has enjoyed proving others wrong.

“We’ve worked hard,” Davis said. “Everyone doubted us to be in the space we are in today, but we’ve done everything we can to have success and build a strong foundation.”

Like his teammates, Davis rolled the dice a bit on playing football for a new program. But he knew Stinespring, who is a friend of his dad's and who had once recruited him to play at VMI.

“Everything with this team is built on dreams, and coach sold me on coming here. He was very persuasive,” Davis said. “But it’s been great. It’s cool to be part of the first ever of something.”

Quarterback Kam Hill feels the same way. He’s thrown for 1,465 yards and eight touchdowns while rushing for two this season.

A former player at Mars Hill, Hill has no regrets about coming to Roanoke.

“It’s been everything God could have laid out for us,” Hill said. “I’ve never been part of something like this. It’s unique and cool and everything has been laid out the way it should be. This year has been fun and I’m blessed to have an opportunity to be one of the guys on the first team.”

The chance to be a part of something new also inspired Stinespring.

I’ve got a lot of Division I t-shirts, a box full of rings and all those things, but I feel this opportunity to do something that hasn’t been done, to create it the way we want it to be done, has reinvigorated me. Not that I needed it, but it has.”

Roanoke hasn’t had football since 1942, unless you count the limited JV schedule the Maroons played last year.

So no one expected it to be easy to get the program off the ground. And there has been a lot of learning along the way.

“Going into a full season with mostly freshmen and sophomores, and the sophomores are really just redshirt freshmen, we knew it was going to be a constant learning curve,” Stinespring said. “I’ve got a notebook filled up with a lot of things on different parts of the program.”

Now, Stinespring had an idea of what he was getting into, having seen ODAC teams like Randolph-Macon, Hampden-Sydney and Bridgewater play in the past. But as far as what to expect from his own team against actual competition, that was a different story.

“That first game was the first time I’ve stepped onto a field with no idea where we are as a team,” Stinespring said. “There was a tremendous unknown factor, but now that we are at this point in the season, I know where we are as a team, where we need to get to and how we need to get there.”

Despite all the unknowns, Roanoke opened the year with three straight wins and four wins in their first five games, their lone loss coming against Randolph-Macon by a 35-17 score.

Roanoke won its latest game last Saturday, beating Guilford 21-20 to end a two-game losing streak.

And while every game hasn’t gone the Maroons’ way, the confidence has not wavered.

“At the start of the season we thought we could go into any game and win. That’s the goal every time we step on the field,” Hill said. “We’ve come up short, but we feel the mistakes we made were our fault. We hurt ourselves, and that has shown in our record a bit.”

But the Maroons keep pushing forward.

“We are trying to get the most that we can out of the season,” Hill said. “We know every week we just have to execute at a high level and just believe we can compete with anyone.”

Davis adds the team has learned a lot along the way.

“We can always do more and we try to take as much as we can from watching film and from the games we play. We have also learned to lead, and that’s been a part of our success.”

Stinespring said one of the reasons Virginia Tech rose up to be a power in college football is because it did things like outwork, outprepare, out-tough and outcompete opponents. Those same things have started to show through with his team here.

“At the end of the day, those are things we did to be successful,” Stinespring said. “And our kids have bought into it. They are making the effort plays, and they don’t quit. They always play to the last second. They believe good things will happen and you can see it grow in them.”

They have also forged a bond that has been instrumental in the team’s success.

“We do a lot of player things together. We go out to eat. We have our own meetings. We do a lot of bonding without the coaches around,” Hill said. “We even go over film on our own and look at what we can do as a team to get better.”

The future looks bright for the Maroons. Davis remembers being at Radford High School, less than an hour from Roanoke in southwestern Virginia and winning the program’s first state championship since 1972. It was a great moment for him and he looks forward to great moments at Roanoke.

“It was cool to win that championship, to be the first team to do it in a long time,” Davis said. “I’ve had a lot of fun helping to build the program and I look forward to the next step to help us keep this going forward.”

Stinespring is excited about what the future holds. He’s proud of how far the team has come but knows there is still a lot of work ahead.

He also knows that whenever he’s done coaching at Roanoke, he wants to make sure the program is in the best possible place.

“My goal is that when it’s my last day, the hat, the whistle and the jersey are left in a better position than when we found it,” Stinespring said. “We want to see how much better we can be than when we started and that drives me every single day.”