IT'S FIRST AND GOAL FOR COUGAR FOOTBALL.

Byline: Mary Schubert Daily News Staff Writer

The optimistic forecast is that Cougar athletes will be crunching helmets and shoulder pads by autumn 1998, but realists know that the hard work of resurrecting College of the Canyons football has just begun.

The COC football program was dropped in spring 1982, but the board of trustees for the Santa Clarita Community College District voted Wednesday night to bring back the sport next year if several conditions can be met.

Seventy of California's 106 community colleges have football teams, including Glendale, Pierce, Valley, Moorpark and Ventura.

The most pressing criteria for COC are financial and legal.

Officials have estimated that resurrecting football would take $145,300 in one-time start-up costs, plus $250,600 in ongoing costs per year. Further, if College of the Canyons added a men's sport, it would have to add at least one women's team to comply with the federal gender equity statute: Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.

``There are still some challenges to be overcome. It's not a done deal,'' said Al Adelini, a COC counselor who was chairman of the Football Feasibility Committee that spent several months researching whether the college once again could field a gridiron squad.

``I feel pretty sure that our community will be watching College of the Canyons football in the fall of 1998,'' Adelini said. ``It was pretty clear that the board wanted to bring back COC football, but they're concerned about wanting to preserve the academic integrity of the college. We don't want a great football team and a bad college.''

In her recommendations to the board of trustees, COC President Dianne Van Hook said adding sports teams must be ``augmentations to our existing offerings and not instead of existing academic programs (or) athletic programs.''

COC fields interscholastic teams in men's and women's cross country, track and field, basketball and swimming, along with men's baseball and golf, and women's softball and volleyball. A committee organized to gauge the feasibility of returning football to COC listed women's soccer as the best addition to campus athletics.

But COC administrator Beth Asmus, who served several semesters as campus athletic director, told the board of trustees that adding men's football and women's soccer could throw the college even further out of compliance to Title IX's regulations. The reason: a football team has about 55 members while a soccer team would have about 18.

Title IX says the number of female athletes must be in proportion to the number of female students, and likewise for the male athlete-student ratio.

Right now, 41 percent of the college's athletes are women but 53 percent of its full-time students are women - meaning there is a 12 percent disparity, Asmus said in a report to the board. Adding women's soccer and men's football is expected to increase that gulf to 17 percent, she said.

One solution would be to add still another women's team, probably golf.

The college has been planning to add engineering classes to its curriculum, board members noted, and that traditionally male-dominated subject could increase the amount of men in campus enrollment - thereby bringing the percentage of male students into closer balance with the roster of male athletes.

Len Mohney, athletic director and men's baseball coach, said College of the Canyons has to do a better job of recruiting female athletes - from among COC students as well as graduating high school seniors. Participation on the women's swimming, softball, track and cross country teams were down this year, he said.

Mike Lyons served on the Football Feasibility Committee and was among those Wednesday night who urged the board of trustees to restore a sport that had been a Saturday tradition during College of the Canyons' first decade.

Lyons said he spoke to representatives of several large valley businesses, including car dealerships, real estate developers, hotels and restaurants. He found enthusiasm for the return of COC football.

``They all said to me that they would support the team in some financial way,'' Lyons said.

Saturday night football would go over big, he speculated, because the Santa Clarita Valley is a family-oriented community that regularly packs Cougar Stadium for Canyon, Hart, Saugus and Valencia high school football games. ``We have four very competitive and active high schools. There's a lot of support for high school football,'' Lyons added.

Booster clubs raise the bulk of the money for those high school programs, noted Lyons, whose sons played football at Saugus High. On any autumn Friday, he added, the stadium seats are packed with 5,000 to 7,000 fans to watch the high school football teams do battle.

``It would be true on Saturday nights, too,'' Lyons predicted.