KALAMAZOO – P.J. Fleck once got in trouble for removing his shirt during a pep rally. It was during his first year as Western Michigan’s coach. A student in the front row was wearing a Michigan State T-shirt. He took offense.

So he removed his shirt and gave it to the student. The school president wasn’t thrilled. Fleck saw no other option. If he was going to build a program, he couldn’t rely only on his players. He had to use the WMU community, too.

That was almost four years ago. If you walk around campus now, it’s much harder to spot an MSU shirt or a Michigan shirt. In fact, when student body president Thye Fischman sees one, he gives his fellow student a spirit violation card, which is a coupon good for a percentage off at WMU’s memorabilia store.

Fischman arrived in Kalamazoo as a freshman at the same time as Fleck. They suffered through a 1-11 season that year. He remembers hearing Fleck’s now famous inspirational phrase, “row the boat,” and being confused.

“What does a boat have to do with a Bronco?” Fischman asked himself.

Nothing. And everything, as it turns out.

Fleck used those three words as a way to brand the program, as a way to tell the story of how a fledging midlevel team buried in the Mid-American Conference was going to rise out of its ordinary foundation and grab the attention of the football world.

Three words. The name of a children’s song. A cliché, even. And yet … it has become the mantra for the unlikeliest sporting renaissance in our state. Row the boat.

The Broncos, you might have heard, are 10-0 and ranked No. 21. They are hosting ESPN’s “College GameDay” this weekend and expect 7,000-8,000 students and fans to pack the central square of WMU’s campus and scream for hours.

They are talking about a January bowl game. The Cotton Bowl maybe. About Heisman consideration for its best player, senior receiver Corey Davis. About where Fleck might land now that’s he has turned football — and WMU’s campus — into a Tony Robbins seminar.

“Students yell at each other now: Row the boat!” Fischman said.

They might be passing one another in a hall in the chemistry building. Or in line at a school cafeteria. Or walking through the campus’ main corridor, where, earlier this week, some 75 people were laying out the erector set pieces that form ESPN’s “College GameDay” stage.

“It’s fun to come to a smaller school like this,” said Justin Endres, the program’s stage and crew coordinator, an 18-year veteran of the Saturday morning phenomenon who spends his falls hopping from Tuscaloosa to South Bend to Columbus to Ann Arbor. “The kids are more fired up.”
This isn’t easy for Endres to admit, as it turns out. He grew up in Mt. Pleasant and graduated from Central Michigan, WMU’s chief rival. But he’s a Michigander and college football fan first. He knows what it means when football success comes to a place on the map few ever think about.
Tim Terrentine knows this, too. He is the school’s vice president of development and alumni relations, a job that has gotten much easier — and a lot busier — this fall. His office has been inundated with calls from WMU alums the last two months who want to reconnect with their school.
It’s not just seeking school memorabilia, either. Or help securing football tickets — for the first time in the Broncos’ history, every home game was sold out.

“Packed!” said Fleck. “We’ve set attendance records!”

This is still not easy for Terrentine to imagine. He grew up in Kalamazoo. Attended WMU. Used to go to the games as a boy and spend the afternoon rolling down the grassy embankment that hugs the west end of Waldo Stadium.

“And I liked football,” he said. 

He just didn’t pay attention to it. Now, because of the buzz the game and Fleck have created, everyone wants in. Terrentine has seen donations rise. Community philanthropy rise. Phone calls from alums who want to come back to campus and get involved rise.

“Football took your pride and allowed it not to be just in the school you graduated from, but in America’s pastime,” he explained. “Athletics is brand building. Our alumns now gladly wear school colors. Everybody is rowing. Pride is at an all-time high.”

If this seems overstated, or shallow — because, after all, it’s a game — well, it’s what the game represents. Football, for all the unease it can cause, is a game of attrition. It’s difficult. It’s painful. It’s, at the college level anyway, 105 players from all sorts of backgrounds coming together in a kind of violent synchronicity. It is fundamental.

It’s also a platform, for better or worse, in our society. No wonder then that the school can’t make T-shirts and hoodies fast enough to stock its shelves. And that it’s seen an increase in prospective student tours. And a massive uptick to its websites, as so many search out the word Broncos and the phrase row your boat.

School administrative officials won’t know until next year what this means for admissions. But applications will surely jump.

“P.J. brings light to the campus,” said Terrentine, “and to the community. If there were ever a time that needs his leadership, it’s now.”

Within months of his arrival in 2013, Fleck helped raise $4 million to renovate the locker room and part of the stadium. That came from alums and local businesses. 

“He was able to sell his vision,” athletic director Kathy Beauregard said.

This didn’t surprise her because of how he sold her when she hired him. Beauregard had wanted a different sort of coach, a younger coach, and was willing to take a chance on an assistant somewhere, like Bowling Green had done when it hired Urban Meyer — now Ohio State’s head coach — from Notre Dame.

Beauregard had met with the team and some former players during the search. Almost to a man, they told her they wanted energy, someone who had played or coached in the NFL, and someone who would be positive. The athletic director believed the old model of authoritarianism was fading. She took a chance on Fleck, who was a wide receivers coach in Tampa Bay when she called him.
“Listening is so important,” she said. “And recruiting. You have to love to recruit. That’s the whole thing. You have to sell.”

In their interviews, Fleck laid out his plan of relentless positivity and the symbol of the oar. Like everyone else, she was perplexed by the row the boat metaphor. But he sold it so forcefully, she bought in, never imagining that wooden oars with Fleck’s signature phrase would become decorative props in offices and dorm rooms around campus.

Or affixed as symbols on the front of elevators, on sheets hanging from student housing, on T-shirts and baseball caps and pins.

“You have no choice but to buy into it,” she said.

Neither do his recruits.

Davis, the receiver with an NFL future, was mesmerized by the pitch. He grew up in Chicago in tough circumstances and knew Fleck was the one as soon as he met him.
“He took a chance on me,” Davis said.

As Fleck began to unearth overlooked players, he used the gradual success of the team — after the 1-11 he went 8-5, then 8-5 — to try to reel in more decorated recruits.

Justin Tranquill was one. A four-star safety out of Ft. Wayne, Ind. When he committed, he was the program’s first four-star prospect.

“I never imagined going to Western Michigan,” Tranquill said. “But one morning I woke up, felt peace of heart, and called Coach Fleck to tell him I was coming. I haven’t looked back.”
Tranquill suffered a torn anterior cruciate ligament last season and redshirted as a freshman. He returned this summer and now leads the defense as a dynamic headhunter, in the Fleck mold. His family is close enough to see him play on Saturdays. That matters to Tranquill.

And it mattered to Beauregard when she was hiring Fleck. The school had gone to Florida and other parts south seeking players under Fleck’s predecessor, Bill Cubit. Beauregard realized that, to build a football community, though, the families needed to be at the games as much as possible.
It was part of stringing together a larger community.

“We emphasize a 6-hour radius,” she said. “It’s about investing the region, too.”
You hear a lot about the greater Kalamazoo community on campus these days. From Fleck, who talks about the school fight song boaters like to sing in front of his lakehouse in the summer, to Terrentine, who says the attention is changing the way alums around the state reconnect with the campus, to Fischman, who said even his mother — a lifelong U-M fan who had season tickets — eschews Ann Arbor on Saturdays now for Kalamazoo.

“People had their doubts about his young, overly confident coach,” he said.

And for that first year, with all that losing, they had ammunition — several upset fans used to hammer in “for sale” signs in his yard. But then row the boat began to take hold. And the wins began to come. And the identity of a region that most drive through on their way from metro Detroit to Chicago without stopping began to reimagine itself.

These days, the question isn’t so much about the boat, it’s about the coach, and how long he is going to stay. (He says his attention is on his team right now.)

Because, as Fischman said, “you spend just a few minutes with him, you know there is something special.”

Up next for Western Michigan: Bulls

Matchup: Buffalo (2-8, 1-5 Mid-American Conference) at No. 21 Western Michigan (10-0, 6-0).
When: 3:30 p.m. Saturday.
Where: Waldo Stadium, Kalamazoo.
TV/radio: ESPNU, WDFN-AM (1130).
Line: Broncos by 35.
Contact Shawn Windsor: 313-222-6487 or swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @shawnwindsor.
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