The Grove City College football program will play a five-game schedule against Presidents’ Athletic Conference opponents this spring.
The conference recently released the football schedules, which will feature two five-team divisions. Grove City will join Case Western Reserve, Geneva, Thiel and Westminster in the North Division for this spring. Bethany, Carnegie Mellon, Saint Vincent, Washington & Jefferson and Waynesburg comprise the South Division. The divisional setup will only be used this spring.
The PAC created this schedule model after COVID-19 forced the cancellation of intercollegiate sports in the fall 2020 semester. Spring 2021 schedules for volleyball, men’s soccer and women’s soccer will be confirmed after dates and start times are set.
All five Grove City football games this spring will be played on Friday nights. The Wolverines will open the five-game slate March 12 with a 7 p.m. home game against defending conference champion Case Western Reserve at Robert E. Thorn Field.
It will be the fifth straight season in which Grove City and Case Western Reserve will meet at night.
The following week, the Wolverines will visit Thiel in the Mercer County Cup game March 19. It will be the first-ever night game in the Cup series, which began in 1984, Grove City’s first year of conference membership. Grove City last played Thiel at night September 24, 1977, in a non-conference game at Greenville High School’s Stewart Field. The Wolverines prevailed that night, 13-6, in a rainstorm.
The Wolverines will have the North Division’s open date March 26. All 10 conference teams will be off April 2 in recognition of Good Friday and Easter Weekend.
Grove City will return to action April 9 by hosting archrival Westminster at 7 p.m. It will be the first night meeting in the series since 2011. Grove City has earned last-second victories over the Titans in each of the last two seasons.
The North Division schedule concludes April 16, when the Wolverines visit longtime rival Geneva.
The season will end April 23 with North-South inter-divisional play. The first-place teams from each division will meet for the conference title. The second-, third-, fourth- and fifth-place team from each division will play the corresponding place-holder in the other division. The sites of those crossover games will be determined at the end of the regular season.
In July, the NCAA Division III Administrative Committee approved a recommendation from the Division III Committee on Student-Athlete Reinstatement to provide a blanket season-of-participation waiver in all sports that are unable to reach the 50 percent threshold, ensuring student-athletes have four meaningful seasons of participation opportunities. In football, five games represents the 50 percent threshold.