The schoolhouse Hall: field trips, Stay In Bounds, and the Road Show

1995 – 2012

For the city's schoolchildren, the Hall was a field trip, and the record of that life is documentary, not nostalgic. The museum's standing services, as its own South Bend-era listings state them, included school-group and field-trip booking, curriculum programs and guided tours, alongside the group admission prices and corporate packages of its rental trade. The Hall's named youth program was "Stay In Bounds," a character-development program run through sports — healthy competition, teamwork and citizenship — designed for third- through eighth-grade students. The program's design was the NCAA's: Stay In Bounds was built by the NCAA and administered nationally through the NCAA Hall of Champions in Indianapolis, and the NCAA's own news record of December 2003 notes the program's presence in South Bend at the College Football Hall of Fame. The NCAA's participation figure — about 55,000 children since the program's inception in 2000 — is the program's national count across all its sites, printed here at that strength and no stronger; it is not a South Bend number, and no South Bend number is offered in its place.

The Hall also went to the schools' country. From July 1999 the museum ran a traveling "Road Show" based in a 38-foot recreational vehicle, carrying the Hall out on the road in the years when its own door count was falling. And once a year the school connection ran through the enshrinement itself: the Enshrinement Festival's youth football clinic, held on the Hall's own Gridiron Plaza, put young players through drills with the newly enshrined Hall of Famers on festival weekend — the Foundation's releases describe aspiring players practicing their skills with the Hall of Famers at the clinic, and the 2010 festival's program, as one inductee recited it, ran golf, block party, parade, fan festival, pep rally, autograph session and youth clinic in a single weekend. What the record does not carry, and this entry names the gap rather than filling it: no count of South Bend school visits — no annual field-trip attendance, no number of local students through the Stay In Bounds program at this site — was reached in the Hall's own published record or the press record consulted. The programming is documented; its local volume is not. The Hall's last transaction in the city closed the school ledger in the other direction: the proceeds of its final two days of operation, $16,599, were divided among the football programs of the five South Bend high schools — Adams, Clay, Riley, Saint Joseph and Washington — a parting gift from the museum to the schoolboy game, recorded in the leaving entry below.

Sources:

1. The museum's South Bend-era description and listings, preserved in the city-data.com article and the museum's local listings — the Stay In Bounds program and its third-through-eighth-grade design, the Road Show and its July 1999 start and 38-foot vehicle, school-group booking, curriculum programs, guided tours and group admission prices.
2. NCAA News, December 22, 2003 — Stay In Bounds as an NCAA-designed program administered through the NCAA Hall of Champions, its presence at the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend, and the program-wide participation figure of about 55,000 children since 2000.
3. National Football Foundation, Enshrinement Festival releases, 2008–2010 — the youth football clinic on the Gridiron Plaza as a standing festival event, with Hall of Famers working with young players.
4. National Football Foundation release, January 24, 2013 — the $16,599 of the final two days divided among the five South Bend high school football programs.