Grace Murphy grew up playing three sports, and she couldn’t imagine leaving that part of her identity behind when she headed to college.
She searched campuses across New England before settling on Stonehill College in Easton — around the time the private Catholic school was ramping up its athletics program, a long‑used strategy that smaller colleges are once again leaning on to attract students like Murphy.
When Stonehill made the leap from NCAA Division II to Division I, the fit became even clearer.
“It was a perfect match,” Murphy, a senior studying education, said. “We are a smaller school, but playing on the biggest stage athletically, which is pretty special and definitely what drew me athletically here.”
In March, the college announced it was buying Easton Country Club, a 150-acre, 18-hole golf course, for its new golf teams.
Athletics is the “front porch” of the institution, often the first way students are introduced to the college, said Dean O’Keefe, director of athletics at Stonehill.
“There are people around the country who have never heard of Stonehill, and the first time they’ve connected with Stonehill or heard about Stonehill has been through athletics,” O’Keefe said.
The push from many small colleges comes at a time when higher education is up against a series of challenges, including the value of a college degree coming under increasing scrutiny, a declining number of college-age students in the U.S. and the climbing sticker price.
Those issues hit smaller colleges particularly hard, which accounts for a large share of the more than two dozen Massachusetts colleges that have closed over the past decade.
“That strategy has been around college athletics since day one, and it never left,” said Andrew Zimbalist, a Smith College professor emeritus of economics. “The demographic crunch right now and other kinds of financial pressures that are hitting colleges make them more aggressive in their effort to retain the size of their student body.”
The interest in college athletics comes as families are investing heavily in youth club sports, potentially fueling students’ interest in competing at the collegiate level. At the same time, many Northeast students are choosing Southern colleges, drawn by the athletic teams and sports campus culture — not to mention warmer weather and sometimes lower tuition.
At Stonehill, the purchase of the 150-acre golf course was part of the college’s five-year strategic plan, along with launching new nursing programs and expanding its graduate and certificate offerings.
It is a continuation of a larger investment in athletics, including building new ice hockey and basketball facilities and expanding its athletics teams by adding women’s ice hockey, women’s golf, men’s swimming and upcoming men’s golf and women’s swimming teams.
“You’ve got to maximize every dollar to feel like it’s providing that return on investment. And so far we’re really pleased with the investment that we’ve made,” O’Keefe said.
However, college athletics can also be divisive. Janet Munroe, a Stonehill alum, gave $20,000 to her school to help fund its science building many years ago.
Since then, she hasn’t been interested in donating because it feels like the college is prioritizing athletics and its campus beautification over academics.
“It looks like a country club. I love a country club, but I see the college putting its resources in athletics and trying to make the college as aesthetically appealing as possible … focusing on less important things,” she said.
She wishes the school would instead invest in building the colleges’ brand as a competitive academic institution. Munroe worries that the strategy of investing in athletics won’t work out long-term for yielding more students to the college.
“I’m not saying there shouldn’t be some investment in athletics in order to be competitive. I am saying it’s a balance,” she said.
Attracting new student populations to college
Athletic recruitment can tap into a new pool of students, especially internationally.
The foreign student population doubled at Nichols College in Dudley over the last three years due to its rugby, ice hockey and other athletic teams, Bill Pieczynski, the president of Nichols said.
The college is a regional institution with around 60% of its student population from a 100-mile radius. The international student population went from about 25 students to over 50, Pieczynski said. The college has a total of 1,072 undergraduate students this academic year.
He said athletics have been part of Nichols’ culture for decades, with around half of the student body participating in varsity sports.
At American International College in Springfield, about 60% of students play a sport. Of the approximately 620 student-athletes at the college, about 80 to 100 come from abroad, Rob Kearney, director of athletics for the college, told The Republican.
More colleges are recruiting students internationally, especially for their soccer programs, he said.
The inclusion of athletics can also help with the worsening gender gap in higher education, where more women are enrolling and completing in college at continually higher rates than men.
At New College of Florida, a small liberal arts school in Sarasota, enrollment declines were met with a conservative overhaul of its curriculum and the creation of a hotly debated new collegiate athletics program.
With significant investments in new facilities and coaches, faculty faulted the institution for putting so many resources behind it. However, the college that was once struggling with enrollment has seen significant gains, including an increase of nearly 200 male students from 2022 to 2024.
At both Stonehill and Nichols, the number of female students has been declining while their male student-athlete populations have been increasing, and their total male student populations have increased or remained the same, respectively.
Stonehill saw its male enrollment grow by 125 students in 2025 compared to 2016, while its female enrollment declined by 104.
Isabella Fleury, a Nichols sophomore who is a co-captain of the women’s golf team, didn’t know about Nichols before she was recruited.
Fleury grew up working on her family’s golf course in Agawam and knew she wanted to play golf in college. She looked at schools from California to Florida to Washington, interviewing with dozens of universities. She didn’t feel tied to staying in Massachusetts.
But Nichols stood out to her for its small community environment and new women’s golf team, which she could help shape and leave her mark on.
“I didn’t want to just be a number,” she said. “I really felt like it gave me an opportunity to be involved in multiple things, not just be in one lane.”
She said sports is crucial to small colleges like Nichols, which is in a rural area, for the community to get together and have something to do.
“There’s nothing really around us,” Fleury said. “We’ve got hills and farms and that’s about it. But I think that’s what the charm of a smaller college has — is you can make it a home away from home.”
Putting the ‘student’ in student athletes
For smaller colleges, athletics is only one part of the student experience, the administrators emphasized.
Academics come first, said Pam Roecker, dean of Athletics at Regis College in Weston.
“I think athletics has been a real source of success,” Roecker said. “We’re able to have a national footprint, recruiting-wise, for athletics. So from California to Florida to Puerto Rico, we have student athletes from all over the country that want to come to the college that wouldn’t normally look at Regis.”
While Regis has been investing in athletics for a long time, the college is continuing to do so with new turf fields and other upgrades.
About one-third of students are athletes, and the school plans to continue growing the number of students on its athletic teams.
David Decew, the director of athletics at New England College in New Hampshire, said the college is also expanding.
It is investing in a new multimillion-dollar athletics center and the creation of new teams such as football, women’s wrestling, cheerleading and indoor and outdoor track, to name a few. Athletics is a “really big piece” of the institution’s enrollment, he said.
The expansion of athletics helps broaden the scope of who the college can attract to help meet the institution’s enrollment goals, Decew said.
“I always tell folks that one of the things that’s happened in the world is there’s a lot of different avenues and ways in which you can get a higher ed degree,” he said.
“You could go online, you could do various certificate programs, but the only place to play college athletics is through college. And the NCAA has rules about being a full-time undergraduate student,” he said.
Of the approximately 1,000 undergraduates, about half are student-athletes, he said, a number that has grown as sports teams have been added. The college declined to provide further data.
He said college athletics bring vibrancy and a sense of community to the campus, and balancing athletics with academics pushes the students to challenge themselves.
“We don’t want it to just be that they’re feeling like employees in the world of athletics. We want them to be involved in clubs, be part of all the student activities and find different ways to be connected to our community. So we really appreciate that balanced piece of where we are,” Decew said.
Can athletics help solve college enrollment woes?
Using athletics as a recruitment strategy is hit-or-miss for colleges, said Victor Matheson, an economics professor at The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester.
Many of the small colleges that have closed over the past decade have had fairly extensive athletic programming, he said.
In fact, the College of Saint Rose in New York announced in 2023 that it was closing the same day its top-ranked team was at the final four for Division II women’s soccer.
“Unless you have a model that you’re providing an attractive education for your potential students, athletics alone is very unlikely to save a college that’s otherwise failing,” Matheson said.
For certain colleges at the Division I level, the appeal of athletics is to bolster a brand name, make it onto television and attract a fan base. But it can be costly to keep up with extensive travel and paying the athletes.
At the Division II and III level, Matheson said it is less about getting airtime and more about using it as a tool for enrollment.
Small colleges often encourage their coaches to keep very large rosters to boost enrollment and can spread scholarships across a large number of athletes rather than a few — which incentivizes more students to come.
“They can say, hey, I’m actually a scholarship athlete. I got an athletic scholarship to a Division II program,” Matheson said. “That’s a pretty good deal for the school if you can get someone to come and pay $50,000 in tuition by giving them a $1,000 athletic scholarship.”
Schools need to be mindful that they aren’t promising playing time they cannot deliver simply to bolster enrollment, he said.
While some institutions are rising through the NCAA divisions, others are content with where they are.
Pieczynski, from Nichols, said the college has considered moving to Division II, but knew that joining a new conference with schools farther away would skyrocket the college’s expenses.
He pointed out that some colleges have to compensate their players, creating an “arms race” for players that can be a dangerously expensive investment.
“Don’t get me wrong, I mean, from where I sit and what I can see, the collegiate athletic world is a bit broken right now,” he said. “Fortunately, at our level, in our region of the country and at Division III and Conference New England, we’re not facing some of those challenges like some of our neighbors.”
Nichols isn’t creating more athletic teams to have more students at the college. And he’d be worried about institutions if they relied too heavily on that. He said that would be a “slippery slope.”
While the college has seen a slight decline in enrollment over the past decade, the number of student-athletes has grown to more than half the student population.
Its applications are up by 28% from the prior year, Pieczynski said. He attributes athletics, its affordability and hands-on learning as a few key reasons for its bump in applicants.
Overall, he sees the investment in athletics as just a piece of the puzzle of how to educate students and teach them how to fail and push themselves.
“It’s just an opportunity for students to experience things that sometimes are hard to manufacture in a classroom or in another setting,” Pieczynski said. “You can be completely competitive in a classroom, but boy, you know, being competitive in front of 300, 400 fans cheering for you or against you takes your competitive performance to a whole new testing level.”
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