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University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, faces rare year without football

Staff file photo by C.B. Schmelter / The University of the South, popularly referred to as Sewanee, has fielded a football team every year since 1891 with only a few exceptions. The Tigers may still play during the 2020-21 school year, but they won't do so during the fall semester, with the SAA voting to call off competition.
Staff file photo by C.B. Schmelter / The University of the South, popularly referred to as Sewanee, has fielded a football team every year since 1891 with only a few exceptions. The Tigers may still play during the 2020-21 school year, but they won't do so during the fall semester, with the SAA voting to call off competition. Staff file photo by C.B. Schmelter / The University of the South, popularly referred to as Sewanee, has fielded a football team every year since 1891 with only a few exceptions. The Tigers may still play during the 2020-21 school year, but they won't do so during the fall semester, with the SAA voting to call off competition.

By Staff Report 3 min read

The Sewanee football program dates to 1891 and a humble origin of a schedule that was made up of three games: two lopsided losses to Vanderbilt that sandwiched a shutout victory against Tennessee – another first-year program – in Chattanooga.

The Tigers have since persisted through World War I, a flu pandemic that limited but did not cancel the 1918 season, the Great Depression, changes in conference affiliations and major overhauls to the game. Only World War II kept them off the football field as Sewanee did not field an official team for four years (1942-45), and last year marked the program’s 125th season.

The coronavirus is proving to be college athletics’ toughest foe in 2020, though, and now it has bitten the Tigers, too.

The council of presidents for the Southern Athletic Association, the NCAA Division III league to which Sewanee belongs, voted Thursday to suspend all conference competition for the fall semester of the 2020-21 school year. Clarifying what that means, Sewanee announced that none of its fall or winter sports teams would participate against outside competition during the upcoming term, referred to at Sewanee as the Advent semester. (The spring semester is considered the Easter semester.)

Football will be joined by the teams for men’s and women’s cross country, field hockey, men’s and women’s soccer and volleyball in being sidelined, although coaches will be allowed to hold practices with student-athletes, according to a Sewanee release, and there is hope of those sports making up for lost time in the competitive arena.