Naked soccer: legacy or scandal?

Eight years ago, a Luther tradition that had grown to an infamous scale and captured the nation’s attention ended. While the term “naked soccer” still evokes stories and legends, current students at Luther were not around to experience the phenomenon firsthand. So, everyone wonders, what was all the fuss about?

Naked Soccer started small with a few senior men who played after the bars closed during senior week. While Vice President and Dean for Student Life Ann Highum thinks it might have started in 1991, other sources say it was happening as far back as the 1970s.

According to Highum, naked soccer usually didn’t involve much soccer playing. Oftentimes, there wasn’t even a soccer ball.

“There were no goals, no teams...it was just kind of a free-for-all,” Highum said.

However, as time went on, the activity had expanded into a ten-day event with hundreds of spectators by 1997.

“One year, there were 500 or 600 people,” Highum said. “Old guys would come from town with lawn chairs and 12-packs of beer, and high school students came after prom. It was a nightmare.”

Some faculty became concerned about the dangers of the event. Reports of sexual abuse, theft, alcohol abuse, and injuries were common on naked soccer nights.

“In the early years, I was able to have a sense of humor about it,” Highum said. “But when it got bigger, it got out of hand and it was scary.”

After 1997, Community Assembly began making recommendations to discourage student participation, but by this point the media had noticed naked soccer.

“There are a number of colleges that have had these kinds of naked events spring up,” Highum said. “Most are kept quiet for obvious reasons, but ours hit the publicity route and it was just quirky enough to be a good story.”

Soon Luther was fielding interviews from the BBC, a radio station in Portugal, USA Today and others.

“It really hit the laugh circuit,” Highum said.

Director of Public Information Jerry Johnson was even interviewed on NPR’s radio show “What Do You Know?”

“He’ll go down in history for his creative response when they asked if faculty would ever play,” Highum said. “He replied, ‘No, our uniforms are usually too wrinkled.’”

Thanks to the press, naked soccer drew even more people from outside the Luther community to campus to watch. In 2001, President Richard Torgerson sent out a message saying that the college did not condone or support Naked Soccer.

One attempt at creating an alternative event for students failed famously. In 2001, Wellness and some faculty planned three nights of activities, the first being a pancake night at 2 a.m. on the lawn.

“I said, surely students won’t take their clothes off in front of their favorite faculty members,” Highum said. “I was wrong.”

Too intoxicated to care if their favorite professors saw them full-frontal, students stripped and played soccer in front of the pancake burners. The next two nights of ‘alternative’ activities were cancelled.

However, some faculty members were less involved with putting a stop to naked soccer than others.

“I thought if students want to do it, they’d do it anyway,” Communication Studies Professor Kim Powell said. “Threats and pancakes were not effective,” she said.

After a night in 2001 that had 125 players, 600 spectators and reports of fights, fireworks and noise that disrupted finals studying, President Torgerson and the Board of Regents decided naked soccer had to end.

In 2002, the president set up a task force of faculty to go on patrol and a list of sanctions students would face if caught playing.

“It took a lot of courage for the president to do it,” Highum said. “It was not a popular decision with the students.”

Many students felt that naked soccer was an important tradition at Luther and were enraged when Torgerson put a stop to it. Nevertheless, the sanctions were effective, and by the end of 2002, naked soccer was essentially finished.

However, eight years later students are still interested. When faced with choosing a Paideia research topic on something related to Luther’s history, David Arendt (‘13) chose to write about naked soccer.

After interviewing people on campus, going through Chips archives for letters to the editor and pulling articles that appeared in Sports Illustrated and USA Today, Arendt had more than enough information to write his paper.

“It ended up being 20 pages long, but none of it felt like fluff,” Arendt said.

After researching the history of the event, Arendt feels that the administration handled it the wrong way.

“There wasn’t much student say,” Arendt said. “Having only seven or eight students from Student Senate involved doesn’t fully represent the student body.”

Although the tradition is extinguished, there are rumors that naked soccer events still happened off-campus during senior week after 2002. However, for the most part, the event has faded away.

“It’s gone out of the immediate memory of the college now,” Powell said.

Eight years after its death, no students on campus have any firsthand experiences of the “glory days” of naked soccer, but its legacy will live on in legends and stories for years to come.