Susan Winder, John Crow and Ryan Caracciolo, Maricopa Community College Board candidates

Tuesday, October 06, 2026 | 24:56

I’m glad that my guests this week on the AZ Political Podcast didn’t take offense when I told them that, normally, I wouldn’t have you people on the podcast.   Not very PC — but what I meant was that John Crow, Ryan Carraciolo and Susan Winder are not candidates for an office that would normally rise to the level of awareness for most voters. In fact, their races are so downballot they are almost on the floor.    Listed after local school district bond measures on the ballot and barely above where you vote on about 5000 judges are the candidates running for… the Maricopa County Community College District (MCCCD) Board.   I made an exception for these candidates because Crow, Carraciolo and Winder are doing things a bit differently: they’re running as a team — and their number one platform is the desire to bring the team sport of football back to the Valley’s junior colleges.    And they are running a sophisticated ad campaign featuring Super Bowl-winning quarterback Donovan McNabb and ASU Head Coach Kenny Dillingham to convince people to “bring it back.”   Football went bye-bye as a school sport at Phoenix College, Scottsdale Community College, Mesa Community College and Glendale Community College after the 2018 season.   Not only do they think that’s wrong, they think the way junior college football was eliminated was wrong: They say the MCCCD board never voted on it — the decision was made by the district’s chancellor and individual school presidents.   Crow, who is an executive for a family of companies specializing mostly in real estate, credits playing football at Phoenix College as changing the trajectory of his life.   “I got out of high school and I had no direction… no idea what I wanted to be and thank goodness there was a junior college program for football because that’s the one thing I knew and liked. I went to play for Phoenix College.    “It gave me two years to be around good men with lots of discipline and a team environment and just gave me that time I needed to really develop to see who I could become.”   Crow, Carraciolo and Winder aren’t solely focused on football — that’s just the angle that gets them in the door with voters. They also want to “aggressively expand training for healthcare careers” to fill what they say are the annual 4,800 registered nurse openings, 3,600 openings for medical assistants, and nearly 15,000 openings for home health and personal care aides in Arizona.    And in order to help fill 20,000 new construction and trades jobs by 2030, they want to expand MCCCD’s two-year degrees, industry certifications, apprenticeships and accelerated specialized training.   Let’s see if they can get all that over the goal line — using football as the lure to draw voters in.