Texas Wesleyan
The football stadium at Texas Wesleyan is steadily making progress. The school can't wait for its completion.
Texas Wesleyan clearly has a working title on this era of the 134-year-old university on East Rosedale.
Football. Football. Football.
The program has been everything the board of trustees and then-President Fred Slabach envisioned — from enrollment booster to “true profit center” to enhancing the student experience — since it was reinstituted for the 2017 season.
“Consistently since 2017, when we brought the program back, football has increased the revenue it brought to the university,” said Texas Wesleyan President Emily Messer, now almost a full year on the job, though formally installed through ceremony and symbol in April.
Much of that is through increased enrollment from football players and financial donations.
Suffice to say, with that kind of impact, finding the right guy to replace the founding father of the second iteration of Texas Wesleyan football was critical.
The university believes it has.
He is Brad Sherrod, a longtime college assistant, who has taken over for Joe Prud’homme.
“There's commitment and there's excitement,” says Sherrod, 54, of the university’s support for football. “I'm just happy for the opportunity that they've given me to do this. It's always been a lifelong dream of mine to be a head coach. For them to give me that opportunity is something I take seriously, and I cherish.”
There is much to do in a short amount of time. Sherrod wasn’t hired until May. Fall camp begins July 28. Game 1 is scheduled for Aug. 29 against Lindsey Wilson College of Kentucky at the Crowley ISD Multi-Purpose Stadium, site of the Rams’ home games for the next two seasons.
Wesleyan will begin playing home games on campus in 2026. The stadium will be on the west side of campus. The playing surface, the track, and lights have already been installed. They’ll next break ground on the field house this summer, followed by home and visitor stands (home first) which will seat about 7,500.
There is perhaps no more important program in progress than that of football, which the school reinstituted in 2017 after the program folded in the weeks after the U.S. entry into WWII.
Few would argue the importance of football on college campuses. Its impact is profound, starting with the opportunities it brings, even at the NAIA level, for marketing the university and boosting its reputation, and the potential financial windfall that follows.
Prud’homme, the former coach at Nolan Catholic High School who made vying for, and winning, state titles a regular thing there, built the program from scratch. There wasn’t a football, pigskin, cowhide, nothing, much less an offensive line on campus when he arrived. Prud’homme stepped down this spring, but he not only built the program, he left it in good, turnkey shape. The Rams went 7-3, 9-2, and 8-2 in his last three seasons.
Sherrod seems a great fit to carry on. A graduate of Duke, where he played football, Sherrod comes here from a years-long career as an assistant at the Division I (FBS) and Division I-AA (FCS) levels. Most recently, he was the linebackers coach at UT San Antonio.
He knows Texas, all of its glorious expanse, from the Panhandle to the Valley and everything in between. Most importantly, he knows Fort Worth, which he recruited at UTSA and at Sam Houston State.
He has visions.
“I don't see the place for what it is, I see what it can be,” said Sherrod, who began his duties in May. “I just think what we're doing here … the alignment of what our philosophy is, how we help students, the demographic of kids that we serve and first-generation students and changing the trajectory of their lives, that's something that I would like to be involved in. That’s what I’m about.
“It’s important that we are in this to educate kids and not just to play kids [on the field] and I think we're in the right direction to move forward here.”
Since the program has been resurrected from history, it has met its big expectations.
“Absolutely it has,” said former state Sen. Beverly Powell, chair of the board of trustees when football returned and now working in the administration building as the assistant to the president for external affairs. “It is a true profit center for our university. It had the exact impact on the institution that President Slabach had hoped for when we reinstituted football as a recruiting mechanism to help to stabilize our enrollment and grow our footprint in the university, and it has done exactly that.”
And, of course, it’s good for the university and the students they serve, football players or otherwise. They all now have a fuller college experience. A marching band is next on the to-do list, Messer said.
First, of course, is the completion of the stadium. The team will again play at the Crowley school district’s stadium this year and next.
There is perhaps no more important place than the coming football stadium.
On the west side of the campus, at the corner of Binkley Street and Avenue E, a stadium footprint is already there. The turf and track have been installed, as have the stadium lights. Construction crews will break ground this summer on the field house and locker rooms. Next year, the school will break ground on home stadium seating, followed by the visitor’s side. When completed it will seat about 7,500. The home crowd will sit on the west side, facing the university.
The Karen Cramer stadium is expected to be a revenue generator all by itself in usage fees from outside organizations. One of those could be the Fort Worth school district.
“Once we are able to complete that, we think that will be the next driver of growth for this community and bringing people to the community,” Messer said.
Powell noted that one of the things that all of the east Fort Worth business area needs is an increased customer base. The football stadium will act as a catalyst for increased traffic. The increased traffic would attract other businesses.
The stadium costs are included in the university’s $40 million capital campaign. Roughly $33 million has been raised. Messer said the school is also exploring different funding options for the stadium as the capital campaign continues through the next 1½ years.
So, there’s a lot of work still to be done, but clearly Wesleyan and Sherrod have a vision in place. And they’re both moving dirt to get there.
Said Sherrod: “I've always had a really good feeling for Fort Worth and its players and coaches here.”