Matt L. Stephens

matthewstephens@coloradoan.com

YUMA — You can’t see the mountains from here.

The landscape is flat. There's nothing but green and gold fields in the horizon, contrasted against a white water tower with faded red letters at the center of town.

One hundred forty-five miles east of Fort Collins, beyond the speed traps and smells of Weld County, sits a town with a postal address of CO that feels more like NE. There aren’t 5,000 people who live here, and a football haven Yuma certainly is not.

The crossbar in the north end zone at the high school is slanted to the right. The chipped paint on the wooden press box doesn’t appear to have received a fresh coat in decades. And the team that plays here — using the Indians mascot unabashed — has won three games in the past two seasons.

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Despite all this, there’s a camp here. The only one CSU football is hosting away from campus. While it’s targeted to kids grades 3-12, there can’t be five of the 92 campers that stand 5-foot-9. And the ones who do weigh 130 pounds on a good day.

Not a single Division I prospect in sight and almost every member of the Colorado State University coaching staff and its operations team decided it was worth driving more than two and a half hours to a town 40 miles from the Nebraska border to hold a football camp.

Why?

This is a satellite camp by definition — an instructional camp held off campus. But the satellite camp CSU coach Mike Bobo hopped on a redeye Tuesday night to attend in Georgia is going to have an exponentially greater payoff for the Rams on the field.

So what’s the return?

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Turns out, the “why Yuma?” question has little to do with football and some of CSU's greats that hailed from there and everything to do with Colorado’s eastern plains.

This camp in Yuma completed its fourth year Tuesday. Four years of running a camp that lacks Division I prospects and is dominated by elementary and middle schoolers. But also four years of post-camp golf for boosters with the coaches at Indian Hills. And a post-golf dinner and auction back in Yuma that 90 CSU fans attended.

Yuma County has 329 CSU alumni, and more than a quarter of them showed up for a dinner with their favorite coaching staff Tuesday.

Before the camp was moved to Yuma by Jim McElwain’s staff in 2013, CSU tried the same approach in Colorado Springs, the seat of El Paso County that houses 6,560 alumni. Fourteen of them cared to come to dinner.

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“For me, this is a promote-goodwill camp. A lot of our alumni are from the east and the Yuma area, and just to come over here and put on this camp ...” Bobo said. “I think these kids probably get more out of this camp and to work with these coaches than any camp we do. It’s a fun thing to come out for two hours and spend a day with these guys and give back.”

There’s a lot of Ram pride — and farm money — out east. More season-ticket holders come from Yuma than Brighton, Castle Rock, Thornton or Colorado Springs. Move the new stadium from campus to the prairie, and the Rams are bound to have regular sellouts.

So while this place doesn’t feel like much like Colorado — no hiking, skiing, craft beer or lumbersexuals — it’s very much CSU. And the goal is to keep it that way.

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“All these little kids, I asked them how many were Ram fans, and they about all were,” Bobo said. “I did have a couple raise their hands and say they were CU fans, but I’d say 80-something of them were Rams.

“Will any of them ever play football at Colorado State? I don’t know that. But hopefully us coming out here and them having a good experience will make them want to go to school there."

For insight and analysis on athletics around Northern Colorado and the Mountain West, follow sports editor and columnist Matt L. Stephens at twitter.com/mattstephens and facebook.com/stephensreporting.

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