In the summer, the grass on the practice field at John Stark Regional High School grows long, but Donnie White can still point out the roughest patches of gravel. He pokes one, hard, with his sneaker. This, he says, is a terrible spot to be tackled.

The green expanse behind John Stark stretches for several acres: Here, the football field; there, the practice field, the boys’ soccer field, the girls’ soccer field, the baseball diamond, the softball field. As an athlete, White grew up with his cleats on this grass. He started his first game, scored his first touchdown and learned how to lose all behind the lot where he used to park his Dodge Challenger every morning before school.

White will likely play on these fields again, but for a different team. In the fall, he will be the first to don the No. 7 jersey for New England College football.

The small private liberal arts college in Henniker has a mission to rebuild its football program, which has not existed at the school for 50 years. NEC’s president, Dr. Wayne F. Lesperance Jr., made the decision to invest in a team in June 2023 alongside athletic director Dave DeCew.

The school, looking to incentivize and increase enrollment, hired veteran coach Kevin Kelly to take care of the new program.

‘Eat, breathe, sleep, football’

If Donnie White hadn’t been offered a spot to play football at NEC, he likely wouldn’t be enrolled anywhere for his freshman year. He wanted to stay close to home in Weare, and he wanted to keep spending all his time, like he does now, on the field. White going to college was a choice, not an inevitability: If he stays all four years, he will be the first among his five siblings, three of whom are older, to graduate college.

“I don’t think I was gonna go just to go,” White says. “But I had to do football.”

He does, indeed. For White, football is powerful: It grants him a sense of accomplishment, bonds him to teammates, helps him realize his own growth. His mother, Lisa Anne Kuhn, says the sport has been part of her son’s whole life.

“He was eat, breathe, sleep, football. And he still is,” she says.

When White is not in school, Kuhn will find him at the field behind her house, running drills and practicing plays. Sometimes he has friends who join him, but often White practices alone.

“Donnie has — I can’t even put it into words, the drive that he has, and the motivation, when it comes to football,” Kuhn says.

The overgrown field at John Stark taught him how to be on time, how to lead and how to lose. White was never a captain of the team, but he stood out and others followed.

“He’s definitely a leader amongst his peers,” says Rodney Brown, the athletic director at John Stark. “People really respect him. The captaincy might not have been there, but the way he played everything was definitely something that people aspired to be and do.”

Brown says White is “tenacious” with his game. Off the field, however, the 17-year-old is soft-spoken and a little shy. He is eager to do his best.

‘Building a legacy’

White and his mother both credit his coaches for much of the way he has developed.

“He just cared for them so much, taught them … discipline, punctuality, trying to be responsible,” says Kuhn of Ray Kershaw, the head coach at John Stark.

Beginning in August, White will have a new mentor in Kelly, the leader and founder of this new program. Kelly has coached football in several capacities: He headed up Georgetown’s program for seven years, coached in the XFL and led defensive coordination at Marshall, to name a few of the many roles he has held in 40 years of coaching football. Through all of that, Kelly has found that he likes coaching players who have more than the game to learn.

“Graduation is the ultimate goal for all of these kids,” Kelly says. “My pitch to them is a four-year all-inclusive program.”

His philosophy, “football-wise,” Kelly says, “is about as pure as you can get.”

But before he can run drills and blow a whistle, Kelly has to build this team. Lesperance quartered the football staff in the old Henniker rail depot, renovated in 2007 to imitate its original style. Green paint outlines the building, which Kelly has renamed “the football depot.” An old stretch of rail lies in front of the entrance like a moat; inside, a painted ceiling mural looks down on polished wood and a quaint design. Above Kelly’s office, a wooden plaque reads, “Conductor.” For now, the coach works here, waiting impatiently for August to arrive.

When it does, the NCAA will finally allow Kelly to take off. On Aug. 14, his team arrives on campus, and Lesperance will greet the boys and their families with a barbecue. After that, the work begins. For 11 days before classes start, Kelly has his athletes on schedule from 8 a.m. to lights out, running drills, learning plays, conditioning. Until then, all he can do is have them complete the workouts he sends out on an app every day.

When it comes to facilities, DeCew and Lesperance have handed Kelly the keys to everything, but they only unlock so much for now. The team will hold its meetings in the Putnam Center, the newest building on campus, which sits right next to the refurbished depot. The equipment came from the Tilton School, which recently dropped its football program. And the field — well, they’re working on that.

As NEC’s rugby team takes leave — a result of a struggling program and a sport with declining interest — the athletics department will hand its field over to Kelly. The program will turn it into a proper practice surface before August, says representative Mike Rupp, but for now, the grass overflows and the painted white lines are notably absent.

When it comes to the real field, the plans are a little more obscure. For the 2024 season, NEC will play all of its “JV schedule” at other schools. Afterward, Rupp says the Pilgrims will host their home games at John Stark, working around the fact that the high school plays its own games on Saturdays because its stadium does not have lights.

Quite a lot still needs to be done, which has kept Kelly in the depot all summer while he waits on his team to arrive. He still, however, has plenty of time for excitement.

“It’s starting to come together, and that’s the fun part of this whole thing. I’m building a legacy,” Kelly says. “The players I have in the program are feeling the same thing, so we’re gonna build this thing together.”

The enrollment cliff

They have good reason to build it. In recent years, many small colleges, especially across New England, have seen a decline in enrollment. This “demographic cliff” stems from a number of issues, lower birth rates in rural areas, better incentives from larger universities, even weather, according to theories from experts at the Chronicle of Higher Education and Forbes.

At a place like NEC, with a small endowment, enrollment keeps the school afloat, financially as well as practically. In order to function, the school relies on a $58,000 yearly tuition from students, of whom it has about 1,000. With financial aid and scholarships, the average NEC student pays $12,500 per semester.

If that enrollment number falls, NEC loses revenue. Lesperance, like many of his peers at other small colleges, decided that athletics would be the best way to sustain, or grow, that number. Already, more than 40% of the undergraduate population at NEC plays a sport, according to DeCew: This is a school that runs on athletes. Building a football program, then, falls directly in line with Lesperance and DeCew’s learning philosophy, which centers around the idea that athletic programs enable students to obtain a well-rounded college experience.

That Kelly has brought 72 students to NEC in one semester, then, is momentous, especially given DeCew’s goal of finding 50. By next season, Kelly expects to be in triple digits, which will mean a 10% increase in NEC enrollment in just two years.

The majority of NEC’s newest recruits come from New Hampshire and New England, largely within a 60-mile radius of Henniker. True to its name, NEC has always put effort into drawing from the local area: Students from John Stark, for example, can attend with a significant tuition discount.

Willing to work

This program could have been designed for White. It happened in the right place at the right time, enabling his lifelong love for football to help build this “legacy” with Kelly.

A few things make him slightly nervous, of course. White thinks it will be “humbling” to go from a senior leader back to being a rookie on a large team with dozens of talented players. He’s nervous, too, about all the travel that will come with this inaugural season. Mostly, though, he’s just happy to be back on a football team.

“College might be a little different,” White says. “But I’m kind of excited for that, for a new group of friends.”

School has also become less daunting for White, since he found he can study something that really interests him. He has enrolled as a sports management major, and wants to coach football when he graduates, to be for kids what his coaches have been for him — a mentor, like he hopes he’ll find in Kelly.

Prospects look good. Kelly says the development of a team culture is “more important than anything.” The seasoned coach has shown already how hard he’s willing to work for these young men. He walked into the depot with nothing but a football and a plan. Now, he has 72 players like White, driven and optimistic.

Come August, when they’re all together, New England College will have a football team. They’ll take it from there.

Sophie Levenson can be reached at slevenson@cmonitor.com.