New Haven Athletics Director Debbie Chin is a pack rat when it comes to sports equipment. It’s a good thing, too, because when the school announced in 2003 that it was discontinuing football, she had a sneaking suspicion that the decision wasn’t permanent.

So she stuffed all the jerseys, pants, helmets, pads, blocking sleds, kicking nets and everything else into a trailer out back. Sure enough, four years later, Chin was able to unlock a new era of New Haven football when the school declared that its membership in the Northeast-10 Conference had facilitated a return to the gridiron.

It’s an interesting full circle for Chin, who had to fill a football coaching vacancy as one of her first duties as New Haven’s brand-new AD in 1993. She didn’t do so badly back then, luring New Haven alum and future Miami Dolphins coach Tony Sparano. He didn’t do so badly, either, taking the Chargers to the 1997 Division II championship game before heading to the pros.

But as an independent Division II team since 1982, New Haven had difficulty scheduling games. The Chargers made their living – albeit an expensive one – traveling to California, Oregon, Washington, Texas, New Mexico, Minnesota and North Dakota to get a competitive Division II schedule. “The Pennsylvania and West Virginia conferences gave us one or two games per year, but beyond that, we were out of region,” Chin said.

Not surprisingly, the school cited budget challenges as among reasons for dropping the sport. Chin said standing before the student-athletes and telling them their program was being dropped “was the worst thing I had to do in my professional career.”

But it wasn’t long before alumni and other interests began clamoring for the popular sport’s return. “It’s just not the same having homecoming around your soccer games,” Chin said. But not only that, the football void created others – students weren’t participating in the football-related entertainment activities on Saturday or Friday nights, and the sense of community football had created was missing.

Without a conference, though, the same problems that took the sport down in the first place would remain. That’s when talks with the Northeast-10 escalated. That coincided with Division II implementing an “earned-access” policy for championship selection that emphasized in-region play against Division II nonconference teams. The union between New Haven and the Northeast-10 satisfied needs for both parties.

New Haven begins play as a member of the league in sports other than football this fall. The Chargers assume football membership beginning in fall 2009.

Chin already has hired a head coach – former Albany (New York) assistant Peter Rossomando – and a staff that already has recruited more than 50 student-athletes. They’ll scrimmage the Yale junior varsity among contests this fall.

Which means they’ll be using some of the equipment Chin had the foresight to save.

“I never got rid of any of it,” she said. “We were barraged by people who knew we had dropped the program and were asking for us to donate the equipment, but I kept it.

“And now we’ve opened that trailer.”