Texas Wesleyan football is coming home with a new game plan in tow for the school’s growth

The soundtrack of Texas Wesleyan University football practice has a steady rhythm.

Jackhammers run. Clack. Clack. Clack. 

Cranes move. Brr. Brr. Brr. 

The sounds of construction compete with the chirp, chirp, chirp of whistles as the $16.5 million Karen Cramer Stadium takes shape on the west side of campus, the most visible sign of Texas Wesleyan’s growing ambitions. 

A decade after trustees voted to bring back football, the university has applied to join NCAA Division II. Leaders hope the step up in competition will help recruit students, bring alumni back and give neighbors more reasons to spend time on the east Fort Worth campus.

The Texas Wesleyan Rams returned to play in 2017. Since 2023, the Rams have practiced at the on-campus stadium, which includes an artificial turf playing surface, a press box and seating for 3,500 spectators. For home games, they board a bus to Crowley ISD Multi-Purpose Stadium.

The stadium is already in use for soccer games, but university leaders expect it to be finished this winter and bring home football games to campus in fall 2027. 

“It’s a lot of fun to be able to look over there on the west side and see new things being added and it being built,” head football coach Fran Johnson said.

It’s not a new playbook. Many smaller or mid-sized universities, such as University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio and Abilene Christian University, have used athletics as an enrollment, fundraising and community-building engine.

Football brings student-athletes and gives the university community a team to rally around, Texas Wesleyan athletic director Ricky Dotson said. Students see the players in class and around campus. On Saturdays, they can cheer for people they know. 

“I wouldn’t say it’s our identity, but it gave us something to identify with,” Dotson said. 

Texas Wesleyan enrolled 2,955 students this fall, including a record 511 first-year students. The university cited expanded academic programs and student support as contributors to growth. It aims to reach an enrollment of about 3,500 students in five years, an increase of at least 25% from fall 2025.

“Our goals are growth, but it’s not crazy growth,” said Lauren Findley, vice president of enrollment management. “Some universities achieve those numbers every year, but we’re building in intentional growth that allows us to grow with it.”

Undefeated since 1941

The old Texas Wesleyan team played — and won — its last football game on Nov. 15, 1941. 

Three weeks later came the attack on Pearl Harbor. Players left for military service during World War II, and Texas Wesleyan went more than seven decades without football. Intramural football returned after the war.

In 2016, then-Texas Wesleyan President Frederick Slabach told the board of trustees that football could bring in students, raise money and make more people aware of the university. Even then, many trustees questioned whether football was worth the cost, said Glenn Lewis, the board’s immediate past chair. 

“Nobody could be sure how it was going to turn out,” Lewis said. 

Slabach eventually persuaded the trustees. 

But the Rams didn’t play immediately. 

Later that month, Texas Wesleyan named Joe Prud’homme, who won state titles at Nolan Catholic High School, as the Rams’ head coach, and he recruited about 75 players for a year of practice. Michael Rosas, one of Prud’homme’s former players, came on as a volunteer coach.

The university added a weight room on the east side of campus. Above it, coaches set up offices and a meeting room.

“The washers and dryers — we didn’t have that. We went to laundromats,” said Rosas, now the outside linebackers coach and the chief of staff. 

The Rams returned to competition in 2017 at Farrington Field, where the old team had played its last home game. The team played in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics’s Central States Football League consisting of teams from the Sooner Athletic Conference and the Red River Athletic Conference.

Lewis remembered a line on the T-shirts that Texas Wesleyan handed out at its returning game: 

Undefeated since 1941.

Run to success

The Rams went 2-9 in 2017, 2-8 in 2018 and 3-7 in 2019. 

During the pandemic, Rosas joined video calls with Dotson about twice a week as they tried to figure out how students could return to school and practice. The Rams played two games in 2020 before Prud’homme proposed dropping the rest of the schedule to work on better strength and conditioning training for his players.

Dotson called it the turning point. 

“I think it allowed them to step away from the results and work on the development of what they wanted to get done,” he said.

The Rams came back together as a team in 2021. Their fortunes changed, as the team finished 7-3 that year. The Rams won or shared four straight Sooner Athletic Conference titles from 2022 through 2025. They went undefeated in the 2024 regular season and made the NAIA playoffs that year and the next. 

During that stretch, President Emily Messer recalled seeing a marquee at Tommy’s Hamburgers on Camp Bowie Boulevard that listed football records each week. The 3-6 Dallas Cowboys. The 6-4 TCU Horned Frogs. Texas Wesleyan — 9-0.

“Once we started having those winning seasons, people started paying attention,” Messer said.

The Rams are 5-5 this season, 5-2 in Sooner Athletic Conference play. 

“I mean, 10 years ago we were hoping to win a game,” Dotson said.

Something to identify with

The sun shone on the stands at Crowley ISD Multi-Purpose Stadium on an October afternoon two weeks ago. Fans cheered as the Rams pulled ahead of the Oklahoma Panhandle State University in their last home game of the regular season, scheduled to conclude Nov. 14 at Wayland Baptist University. 

These days, defensive back Evenn Head sees more students coming to the games. More navy and yellow in the stands. 

Head chose Texas Wesleyan in 2023. The campus is about 12 minutes from L.D. Bell High School in Hurst, close enough for his high school coaches to come watch. The small classes suited his “feng shui,” as he put it. 

His parents and sister come to games. So do aunts, uncles and cousins. 

“I got to go give them a show,” Head said.

For Tony Hartnett, the number to watch is 65. That’s his son Nick — a backup left tackle for the Rams. Hartnett coached his son on the Saginaw Horned Frogs when Nick was 6. The family goes to every game, following the Rams to Arkansas, Louisiana and Oklahoma.

“Oh, it means everything,” Hartnett said of what football means to his son. 

A room without coaches

When Charles Welde came to coach the offensive line in 2025, his players kept their pads in cars or dorm rooms. They carried their gear to practice in travel bags and put it on at the field. When coaches needed to meet, they looked for a classroom.

Texas Wesleyan celebrated the opening of the Moritz Fieldhouse that October. Players have lockers now. They can receive treatment, shower and drop off laundry before class. Coaches have offices and a room to meet with the team.

Every coach makes recruiting calls and sends emails. They go to Houston and West Texas and set up satellite camps in San Antonio, at Angelo State University and on their own campus. Welde pitches Fort Worth and asks players what they want to study. Some want to coach or teach. Others ask about sports business or entrepreneurship.

Texas Wesleyan reported $1,628,421 in football expenses in 2025-26, about one-fifth of its athletics spending. The total includes costs assigned to the team, such as scholarships, coaching pay and benefits, recruiting and travel. The university attributed $1,842,615 in revenue to football

A recruiting trip to California helped Welde recruit Ian Jernagin.

Jernagin, a running back from Bakersfield, arrived in January for his first time in Texas. He liked being in a city and got to know the Fort Worth Water Gardens and Sundance Square. He said he made the dean’s list in spring, crediting small class sizes and professors he could approach.

“I’m able to focus a little bit more and lock in on what I need to learn,” he said.

On big recruiting visits, Johnson has the coaches step out of the room. Parents and prospects talk with current players.

“They can ask anything they want,” Welde said.

Welde also keeps a group chat with his linemen’s mothers to send pictures from practice and reminders about grade checks. When a player misses class, he checks in with his mother.

“They talk, they sit together at the games,” Welde said.

What do we do from here?

Some trustees were interested in applying to join Division II in 2019. 

Texas Wesleyan hired a consultant, whose study showed the university needed better facilities, Dotson said. The school set the idea aside.

When the Lone Star Conference approached Texas Wesleyan about two years ago, the university commissioned another study as that would require the university to evolve from the NAIA to NCAA Division II to join the conference, Dotson said. 

By this fall, it had the fieldhouse, upgrades at the multisport facility Sid Richardson Center and a stadium nearing completion. Its financial footing was stronger, too, he said.

Four conference titles had raised another question for Dotson. 

What it means to be a DI, DII, DIII or NAIA athlete

• NCAA Division I: Programs generally have the biggest budgets, offer the most athletic scholarship money and demand more of athletes’ time.
• NCAA Division II: Teams often compete regionally, and athletic scholarships are typically partial.
• NCAA Division III: Schools cannot award athletic scholarships. Players can qualify for academic or need-based aid and typically spend fewer hours on sports during the season than their Division I and II peers.
• NAIA: Programs offer athletics scholarships in conjunction with other forms of tuition assistance.

Source: IMG Academy

What do we do from here?

Trustees authorized the university to apply for the transition in February. The Lone Star Conference extended a formal invitation to pursue membership in August, and Texas Wesleyan submitted its NCAA application before the October deadline. The applications committee meets next February, Messer said. 

If accepted, the university expects to begin Division II competition in 2028-29.

Immediately after the August invitation, football season ticket sales doubled and first-game ticket sales tripled, Messer said. Social media viewership quadrupled. 

Dotson sees the move as another way athletics can help the university grow.

The NCAA name carries credibility with recruits and fans, he said. 

Texas Wesleyan offers a different version of college football from its neighbor, Texas Christian University, a Division I and Big 12 team where millions of dollars flow through name, image and likeness deals and other spending. Southern Methodist University and University of North Texas are the other Fort Worth-Dallas programs that play in Division I’s Football Bowl Subdivision.

“There’s a place for people who want a collegiate athletic experience that’s not about the bright lights and the million dollars and the players getting paid,” he said. “And I think we sort of have an affinity to those people.”

The nearest Division II football program? Midwestern State in Wichita Falls, about a two-hour drive.

“We’ll be the only Division II football program in all of DFW,” Messer said. “That’s exciting.”

Johnson has lost recruits to Lone Star schools even when he thought the Rams offered a better scholarship. The NCAA name mattered to those players, he said. He hopes a Division II team in Fort Worth will give more players from North Texas and Houston a way to stay close to home.

Daniel Peoples lined up against the Rams in the 2025 playoffs while he was at William Penn University in Iowa. He transferred to Texas Wesleyan this year and is now about three hours from his mother in Houston. By October, she’d been to two games.

“My mom is a single parent, so it really means more to me,” Peoples said. 

Six of the Lone Star’s 10 football teams this season are in Texas. Dotson envisions more road games Rams fans can get to, compared to the current games against opponents in the Sooner Athletic Conference. Lewis expects more visiting alumni in Fort Worth.

“I think we’re going to develop natural rivalries,” Dotson said.

What the opener showed

When the University of Central Oklahoma, a Division II team, came to Crowley for the 2026 season opener, its team’s visiting fans went to the Stockyards. Dotson estimated about 350 people came to Central Oklahoma’s tailgate party.

Central Oklahoma won 59-7. 

The game showed Johnson the difference in talent the Rams would need to match, he said. 

Johnson and Dotson talked afterward about the scholarships Texas Wesleyan would need to offer to compete at the next level. The university hired a full-time director who helps Texas Wesleyan comply with NCAA requirements in July and plans to add strength and conditioning staff. Dotson expects to raise money for scholarships and to keep improving facilities. 

Johnson said the first years could include more losses than the Rams are used to.

Dotson doesn’t just expect the Rams to be in Division II — he wants them to learn how to win in Division II. 

For now? 

“Well, it’s going to require patience,” he said.

The name on the stadium

Lewis, the board’s immediate past chair, used to walk to class from his first house in Polytechnic Heights. He grew up just east of there in Stop Six. At meetings of Poly small-business owners, recent talks often turn to the university and its stadium. He hopes fans will stop at the shops nearby.

“A tagline for Texas Wesleyan used to be ‘The best kept secret in Fort Worth,’” Lewis said. “And it is my wish that we no longer be the best kept secret in Fort Worth. That we could be widely known now.” 

When trustees voted to restore football, they were already talking about a stadium on campus. They thought it could draw people to the university and the businesses around it, Lewis said.

Karen Cramer joined the board in 2016. Her grandmother graduated from Wesleyan in 1917, when the school was Texas Woman’s College. Her parents met on campus during World War II. In 2021, Cramer became the stadium’s lead donor with a $5 million pledge.

In a photo from this spring, Cramer wears a yellow Texas Wesleyan sweatshirt. She holds a football helmet and makes the Rams Up sign. Student-athletes stand around her. Her name is on the blue sign behind them.

She died in June at 76. 

The stadium was still going up.

“I wanted so much for Karen to live to see it,” Lewis said.

A year ago, Peoples was on the other sideline. He still can’t quite believe he is part of the next generation who gets to play in the new stadium. 

Rosas, the outside linebackers coach, sometimes looks at the fieldhouse and the stadium and feels like he has to pinch himself.

“It’s been a good, hard, steady drive to get the right things in place, and man, that’s why I’m still here,” Rosas said. 

Multimedia journalist Elvis Martinez-Cartagena contributed to this reporting. 

Dang Le is the higher education reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at [email protected]. 

The Fort Worth Report partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.

The Report’s higher education coverage is supported in part by major higher education institutions in Tarrant County, including Tarleton State University, Tarrant County College, Texas A&M-Fort Worth Christian University, Texas Wesleyan University, the University of Texas at Arlington and UNT Health Fort Worth. 

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