BELTON–Within the UMHB football program, there is a great anticipation about what is being formed.
Last season and its 6-4 record is in the rearview mirror. However you look at it, it left a bitter taste in the mouths of the Crusaders, who appear that much more driven, and cohesive, in the quest to take back the ASC title and a spot in the NCAA playoffs.
The elephant in the room surrounds the state of the ASC itself, and the future for UMHB considering the changing landscape of Division III athletics, and more specifically, Division III football in the state of Texas. With just four football-playing institutions left in the conference, the schedule looks drastically different than in past years, with the ASC notably playing a double round-robin conference slate.
But on the practice field and around the fieldhouse, where UMHB is currently progressing through spring workouts, The Cru seems to understand that aspect is outside of their control. What they do have is an opportunity to learn from the way 2023 unfolded, and improve upon it.
While “spring ball” looks different at the D-III level as compared to the D-I and D-II levels of college football, it holds a high importance for programs across the spectrum. And for UMHB, a program with playoff hopes and goals in the fall, the time spent on the field in the spring is critical to laying a foundation. After all, the team has only a handful of weeks in August before Week 1 of the schedule arrives and the mentality quickly shifts from “preseason mode” to “go-time”.
“It’s everything,” UMHB head coach Larry Harmon told True To The Cru of the importance of this time of year for his program. “It’s been the foundation of our program since we started. We’ve always had boot camp. We haven’t always had spring ball. You always built your team in the spring. It was all about getting those guys to be outside of themselves, and be more encouraging with their teammates, and getting to know their teammates.
“You go out there and work out for an hour, and you’re a little fatigued, a little tired. We’re asking our guys, instead of worrying about, ‘I need oxygen right now,’ to know your partner feels the same way. Let’s encourage him and tell him how he can do it. Let’s worry about him more than yourself.”
One of the aspects of the spring that Harmon reiterated is the cohesiveness that he has seen unfold coming off of last season. The team chemistry is at a high point. No longer is the team divided by the returners from 2022 and last year’s newcomers.
“I really feel like our young guys and our older guys have really bonded in a sense that we’re not the returners and new guys anymore. We’re just the Crusaders.”
Amongst that group is the team’s Unity Council, which is composed of six players that were voted and selected by their teammates. While it is a smaller group than in years past, these six, Harmon said, convincingly separated themselves from the rest. In essence, UMHB entered this spring with six smaller teams within its larger whole, each led by a different member of the Unity Council.
“To watch that leadership grow with those six guys, who got the smaller teams to buy into themselves and then merged it all together with a boot camp [has been great]. While they were lifting, it was kind of six separate little teams.
“Then we came together right after spring break and got into boot camp and those six teams have now been merged into one. You can just sense this thing really building. The energy we have going out to practice is better than what it’s been the last two years. In ‘22, I thought we were just tired because we played so many games in ‘21. But we were still lacking that last spring. This spring has a totally different feel.”
Harmon said that this Unity Council in particular has embraced the mentality of being servant leaders, something the program holds in high regard. And that approach has been clear throughout the spring.
“This group of guys has been [focused] on a sense of responsibility, encouraging people, bringing guys along, and getting them to understand The Code of The Cru. Getting them to understand Trust, Commit, Care, and what it means to be a servant leader. This group goes out and really demonstrates [those things]. What a blessing it is for them to be able to do that and be looked upon in that way.”
One of the storylines through last season was the number of young players who earned significant amounts of playing time, and made strides over the course of the season. While it was difficult to have so much youth on the field at times, it does appear that will serve as a foundation for 2024, considering the number of returners.
“Dillan Botts is one that really sticks out,” Harmon said. “He was one who contributed real early but he’s really taken off. He’s really separated himself as a guy on our D-Line that is going to be a big-time difference maker. I think Isaac Phe has made some really good progress. Last year, we were in some situations where he felt more reluctant to really go after making a play. He was more worried about making a bad play than making a play. I think he’s a lot more comfortable in what he’s doing, playing a lot faster and more carefree, really trying to make some things happen.”
Additionally, he said that Durand Hill and Johnny Smith-Rider have stood out in their leadership on the defensive side of the ball.
“Durand Hill and Johnny Smith-Rider are older guys, but they’re different. They’ve been great mentors to the defense, trying to get everybody on the same page.It’s kind of like having on-field coaches. TJ Rone, Chris Gacayan, all those guys that got forced into the battle last year have all made giant strides.”
As the spring winds down for The Cru, Harmon is confident in the developments made. UMHB is moving in a good direction as the Sept. 7 season opener sits 156 days away.
“We’ve been able to have nine opportunities to go out and do some skill stuff,” Harmon noted. “We’re getting some development there. I think we’re on track for some good things and we have a good recruiting class coming in. We’ll keep plugging away. We have this week and next week, and then the guys have finals. Then they go home. They’ll come back in early August.”
Breaking down the 2024 schedule
Opinions on the 2024 schedule have made their rounds in both the local and national landscape of D-III, in large part for two primary reasons. The first is that UMHB has three non-D3 opponents on the slate for the first time in program history, two of which are deemed noncountable by the NCAA for failing to meet requirements as both Westgate Christian University and John Melvin University are in the early stages of their existence.
And that first reason stems from the second. At the core of the schedule conversation, the recurring question is ‘Why?’ Why put non-D3 opponents on your schedule when you know it drastically, and very nearly eliminates, any chance of earning an at-large bid to the NCAA playoffs? Why put institutions on the schedule whose football programs are very much in an infancy stage and who are unaffiliated with the NCAA or NAIA?
The truth is that the conference situation has driven all of it. Harmon and his staff, as was previously reported in the Temple Daily Telegram and confirmed directly to True To The Cru in a recent interview, contacted every D-III program asking about the possibility of arranging a non-conference contest. This came around the same time as the ASC announced it would move to a double round-robin format for conference play, due to a lack of teams in the league. Even still, UMHB and its ASC contemporaries needed four non-conference games, a tough task for programs in such a geographically-isolated part of the country.
It was more non-conference games than UMHB ever needed to fill in past years, and despite Harmon personally making contact with every regionally-ranked team from 2023, there were no leads. Outside of one. UW-Whitewater, long revered as a juggernaut within the D-III ranks, agreed to a home-and-home series that will be played over the next two years, with UMHB making the trip to Whitewater in Week 3 this season, and the Warhawks traveling to Belton next year. It will be the seventh-straight year the two programs play, and the fourth-straight in which they will face off in the regular season.
“It’s two great programs that enjoy competition,” Harmon said. “[Two programs] that still have the attitude, ‘We’ll play anybody, in any place, any time.’ We’re very excited to have them back on the schedule. It was a mutual thing. It was something we talked about after the game [last season]; ‘Let’s do this again.’ It’s good for our fans, it’s good for our kids, and it’s a highly-competitive game. Kudos to them for being willing to take the game, and kudos to them for being willing to keep it a home-and-home.”
That has been a battle as well. Teams struggle to commit to making return trips to Texas when the non-conference scheduling discussions take place, often citing a variety of reasons. Some of that is financial, but ultimately, regardless of the reasoning, it makes getting home games that much more difficult for UMHB, and the other three current ASC teams also find themselves in a similar boat.
That being said, Harmon was asked if the addition of Westgate Christian and John Melvin—both home games—to the schedule came from an intent to balance the non-conference schedule with home and road matchups. He told True To The Cru that was not the case.
“At that point, we were just trying to get games,” Harmon said. “Plain and simple.”
The decision to put those two noncountable opponents on the schedule came only a short time before the slate was released publicly, Harmon added.
“We felt like we waited as long as we could wait,” he said. “It wasn’t getting any easier. There wasn’t anybody chomping at the bit. There wasn’t anybody we could offer any more guarantee [money] to. Eventually it just comes down to who’s willing to play and who’s not.”
As Harmon correctly pointed out, The Cru wasn’t the only team in that position in this part of the country. Both Howard Payne and ETBU were in similar positions, and there are only so many non-conference games to go around considering the SCAC, who will resume playing football this fall, opted for a double round-robin league schedule. That diminished any real possibility of ASC programs scheduling non-conference meetings with SCAC programs, taking away the ideal situation of getting non-conference D-III games within driving distance for both teams. Instead, they were forced to look at teams from outside of the state, the majority of whom would have to fly. As it turned out, Howard Payne and ETBU will each face Westgate Christian—that was part of how UMHB made the connection with WCU in the scheduling process—and HPU is playing three of its four non-conference games on the road. Only one, a matchup at Wittenberg, is against a D-III opponent.
“Our kids deserve to play 10 games,” Harmon said. “Our kids deserve to have the best competition that we can get them. That was exactly at the forefront of what we were trying to get accomplished.”
The season opener comes on the road as UMHB makes program history by playing in the state of Tennessee for the first time, battling Bethel (TN), a nationally-ranked NAIA program. The Wildcats were ranked No. 7 in the NAIA at the end of last season, and are a formidable opponent when it comes to The Cru being tested in Week 1. The downside is the fact that the game will not count in the primary criteria for UMHB’s playoff resume, something that proved detrimental to North Central a season ago when the Cardinals faced NAIA Roosevelt in the season opener and were denied the right to host in the postseason for the second round and beyond.
If the Crusaders can play 10 D3 games, that is the route they will take every time. But when UMHB finds itself in the position of an absence of D3 opponents, the next best thing is to get a matchup with an NAIA opponent who will prepare UMHB for the postseason and challenge the visitors from Belton.
“At the end of the day, it’s going to be great competition,” Harmon said. “They reached out to us, so that was the cool thing. They were having the same problem we are because of their success. Nobody wanted to play them. It was nice to have somebody reach out to wants to play.”
Playing less than 10 games wasn’t an option, either. It was non-negotiable in many ways, considering the routine that comes from a consistent schedule over the course of a football season. Routine and rhythm is extremely important, without the non-D3 games, UMHB would have been left with a somewhat choppy schedule that left almost zero time to get into a gameweek routine before the all-important conference schedule begins.
“We had two flights already that aren’t cheap, but not one time was I told, ‘We can’t fly again,’” Harmon noted, a credit to the UMHB administration and its commitment to UMHB putting together the best schedule possible. “It was, ‘What do we have to do to fill a schedule?’ It’s disheartening that it’s come to what it has come to to get 10 games. But we’re going to make the best of it. We’re going to play the double round-robin, get into the playoffs, make a run, and still have the same goals and aspirations that this program has always had.”
As of Tuesday afternoon, UMHB had contracts in place with all of its non-conference opponents, but did reach out to SAA programs about a potential matchup considering recent developments. The SAA institutions have been put in a predicament with the announcement of Birmingham-Southern’s closure two weeks ago, and as a result, have one additional open date on each of their schedules. However, no concrete leads about a non-conference matchup with one of those programs had materialized at the time of True To The Cru’s interview with Harmon.
Mark Carey promoted to defensive coordinator
Amongst the other notes from the spring, Mark Carey has been promoted to defensive coordinator role and will also coach the linebackers for The Cru after previously serving in a Special Teams Coordinator/Defensive Line coach position. A 2006 UMHB graduate who is in his second stint on the Crusader staff, Carey has a passion and commitment to the program that is unmatched.
“I opened it up,” Harmon said. “I interviewed some really good candidates that had a lot of experience. At the end of the day, I had to make the decision that I thought was absolutely the best decision for the program. I felt like Mark was the guy. He’s taken this opportunity and run with it.
“There isn’t anybody I could’ve hired that would’ve worked harder than Mark Carey will work. His sense of responsibility is really strong. He’s not going to take shortcuts. He’s not just going to go home because it’s the end of the day. He’ll do whatever it takes to get the job done. The defense seems to really be taking a liking to him. He took over the linebackers for Coach Johnson, and they haven’t skipped a beat.”
