Sometimes when Dan Ravenel ’72 is driving his car and spots a soccer game in progress along the highway, he’ll pull over to watch. It could be a school league match or a pick-up game among friends. He’s not concerned with who’s playing. He just loves to observe “the beautiful game.”
“Soccer has an élan about it. It is just a great game to watch. I am a soccer guy, and my family are soccer people,” says Ravenel, who is currently president of the Alumni Association and has served on the Board of Trustees, Foundation Board and Cougar Club Board.
Ravenel played soccer as a boy growing up in Charleston at a time when soccer was still a fringe sport in the U.S. As a sophomore at the College in 1969, he started a soccer club with friends from his fraternity. It was the first soccer team to play for the College. They took the field against any opponent that could muster 11 players, including crewmembers from ships docked at the Navy base.
The portly British sailors would decimate the students in the first half before Ravenel, who usually played goalie, and his teammates employed their secret weapon: “During halftime we would invite them over for a drink and we’d have a keg. So they were ill-equipped to sustain themselves the second half. It worked every time.”
After college, he stayed close to the game as a rec coach and NCAA referee. By then, soccer had become a varsity sport at the College, and in the mid-1970s he officiated the first matchup between the Cougars and The Citadel.
Later, he passed along the sporting tradition to his children, who played on several state championship soccer teams.
Ravenel doesn’t play soccer anymore. But his continued passion for the sport has helped ensure others can. Ten years ago, he established an endowed scholarship to support women’s soccer players at the College. It was his way of giving back to the university that gave him so much.
With an initial corpus that has more than doubled, the Daniel Ravenel Endowed Scholarship has made a difference in the lives of several student-athletes over the years.
“The real joy of having a scholarship like this is getting to meet the recipients and their parents and being part of their college experience. You, the donor, get more out of it than what you give.”
– Photo by Alice Keeney ’04
