‘Virginia’s Championship City’ marks a major milestone with Stagg Bowl

The Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl turns 50 on Friday night when Cortland and North Central face off for the NCAA Division III football national championship.

And a milestone game deserves to be played somewhere that recently reached a notable benchmark of its own.

The nationally televised championship (7 p.m. ESPNU) returns to its longtime home: Salem Stadium, which hosted every Stagg Bowl between 1993 and 2017. And while the NCAA decided back in the mid-2010s that it wanted to take the game to other venues, it also decided that the 50th edition needed to be played in the city that now has a dyed-in-the-wool association with the NCAA and its Division II and III championships.

“We got it because the committee wanted to reward Salem for 25 years of hosting,” said Carey Harveycutter, the city’s longtime director of civic facilities, who now carries the title of director of tourism. “And we only wanted it on the 50th. So, if they hadn’t canceled the 2020 game, we would have had this in ’22.”

When you add all the other basketball, baseball, softball, soccer, volleyball and lacrosse championships that had been determined within the city limits, Friday’s game will be title game No. 100 … and 102.

OK, that milestone is a little off — blame the Division III men’s and women’s soccer trophies that were handed out at the beginning of the month.

For those keeping track, that’s one of the few times Harveycutter’s timing has been off on the part of his professional career that he never dreamed would be included on his resume.

As director of civic facilities, Harveycutter’s job was to find potential clients to fill dates in the city’s various venues. At that point, he had proven to be good at his job, but not in a sporting sense.

Concerts were his specialty back then, and a few years earlier, he was also part of the brain trust that turned the facility’s massive parking lot into the Salem Fair.

But by the early 1990s, Harveycutter was eyeing a new whale of a client — the NCAA. And the target was a big one. Salem wanted to host a football championship. And the plan was to treat the event just like they would if Taylor Swift was coming to town.

“We wanted the game because we thought it would be a great football game to have,” Harveycutter said. “It was after the high school season, so we wouldn’t have to worry about the turf.

“We had no idea it would grow into what it became.”

The first game

All these years later, Harveycutter still shivers just a little when he recalls the weather conditions on Dec. 11, 1993.

The modern-day Stagg Bowl had been played 20 times before making its first appearance in Salem. The chairman of the NCAA Division III Football Committee at the time, Moose Malmquist, felt that the event needed a change of scenery.

“The exact quote was: ‘I want this to be the best damn championship these boys have ever been in,'” Harveycutter said.

In the end, Salem was awarded the next three championships, beginning in 1993. It would be the highest-profile college football game to be played in the Roanoke Valley since the traditional VMI-Virginia Tech Thanksgiving weekend game at old Victory Stadium was abandoned after the 1971 season.

“When they made the bid, I think it became an entire regional push,” said Mike Stevens, who at the time was a sportscaster on WDBJ-TV in Roanoke but now serves as the City of Salem’s director of communications. “We couldn’t have gotten the game from the NCAA if we had not shown them what was available in the Roanoke Valley.”

And while Harveycutter could assure the NCAA’s site selection committee that Salem had a quality stadium, plenty of available hotel rooms and a variety of food options for visitors, he did his best to sidestep climate concerns.

As anyone who has lived in Southwest Virginia knows, December weather patterns in the area are quite unpredictable. So Harveycutter decided to play the odds.

“When we submitted the bid, we told the committee that the average temperature in mid-December was 50 degrees, the chance of rain was about 10%. Snow — less than half of 1%.”

The 1993 Stagg Bowl featured two first-time qualifiers, Mount Union College of Ohio and the recently renamed Rowan University of New Jersey. When they arrived in the Roanoke Valley, they enjoyed the mild late-fall conditions Harveycutter promised.

Game day was different.

A cold front arrived in the valley, and it brought its old friend the wind. Salem’s championship committee had expected as first-time hosts that some issues might pop up. The weather helped enhance some of those problems.

“At game time, there was about a minus-30-degree wind chill and the flag was blowing out the stadium the entire game,” Harveycutter said.

However, there was plenty that went right, too.

Despite the poor weather, the game was a sellout. The announced crowd of 7,304 was the largest to witness the Stagg Bowl in more than a decade. The local media gave the event plenty of attention in the weeks leading up to game day. And for the first time in Salem’s history, a game being played within the city limits was being televised on ESPN. Harveycutter said he still remembers when it finally came time for “The Star-Spangled Banner” to be played.

“That was the most moving thing when we started,” he said. “We had done all this work and then the Salem band played the national anthem, and it put a tear in my eye. I realized, ‘Hey, we were really able to do this.’ Salem, Virginia, hosting a live national TV broadcast on ESPN.”

There have been better weather days since that first game — and worse. Perhaps the best-known was in 2009, when nearly 20 inches of snow dumped on the Roanoke Valley in less than 24 hours. While the 11 a.m. kickoff was delayed to the evening, employees from nearly every department in the city worked to get the stadium, stands and roads cleared. Once again, the city proved to the NCAA that when one of its events was in town, it was the city’s priority.

“They excel at providing hospitality and a welcoming environment for events that for years weren’t coveted,” said Old Dominion Athletic Conference commissioner Brad Bankston, whose conference serves as the league host for Salem’s Division III events. “Because of the investment the city made in the student-athlete and the experience the student-athlete had, they really built a framework of what these events are and have been moving forward.”

1 to 100

From that point on, Salem became a regular partner of the NCAA. In 1994, the Moyer Sports Complex hosted the Division III softball tournament for the first time. In 1996, the first of 22 NCAA Division III basketball was played across the parking lot from the football field at Salem Civic center.

Both Harveycutter and his longtime events co-director John Shaner, who is also director of the city’s parks and recreation department, are known around the country as experts in the process of putting on NCAA events. They have been asked to speak to planning committees in other host cities, and even serve as tournament representatives for events being held outside of Salem.

But their focus remains on the Salem events and making sure the community will continue to support the mission. The next championship on the schedule is this spring’s Division III lacrosse at Roanoke’s Kerr Stadium. Other championships on the books include men’s and women’s volleyball, women’s basketball and soccer.

Current Salem Councilman Randy Foley, who also served as mayor between 2008 and 2020, said the sense of pride the community has in being known as “Virginia’s Championship City” goes well beyond the city limits. Foley said when he lived away from his hometown while serving in the Air Force in the 1990s and early 2000s, it always warmed his heart when a sporting event in Salem was being shown on national TV.

“It’s been a big part of the community,” he said. “Seeing the hometown was great on ESPN.

“But while we received the notoriety, it probably has impacted the Roanoke Valley even more economically. It’s been a team effort.”

The football game will be moving on to other locations after Friday, beginning with the 2024 event scheduled to be held in Humble, Texas.

Plenty of memories

Harveycutter said so much has happened during Salem’s 30 years of hosting NCAA championships that it’s hard to pick just a few.

While there have been plenty of great participants, few compared to Mount Union wide receiver Pierre Garꞔon, who starred in three of the Purple Raiders’ 19 trips to Salem. Garꞔon went on to play 11 years in the NFL. A close second is probably Garꞔon’s wideout predecessor Cecil Shorts III, who spent six years in the NFL after graduating.

And then there were the coaches. Mount Union’s Larry Kehres became a family friend, Harveycutter said, as did Rowan coach K.C. Keeler, whose teams made it to Salem five times but never won the title. It was different for current Kansas coach Lance Leipold, whose Wisconsin-Whitewater teams faced Mount Union nine times in 10 years at the Stagg Bowl and won six of those.

The 2003 game was also the year college football’s winningest coach, John Gagliardi, won the last of his four national championships when St. John’s of Minnesota upset Mount Union 24-6.

“A few years earlier, John got here, and they lost,” Harveycutter said. “I’m not sure anyone thought he would get another chance, but he did. It was great to see.”

He expects a few more memories will come out of this weekend, and he’s looking forward to it, especially if they’re not weather-related.

“There’s a lot more visitors coming to this one,” he said. “There’s a lot more VIPs. There’s a lot more friends that I haven’t seen in a number of years. So I’ll be torn between the operations side of the game … and seeing people I haven’t seen in a long time.

“It’s just going to be really good to see everyone.”