I know that all of us on here are die hard spiders fans, but I think a reality across college athletics today is that there is an overall decrease in student interest to attend games. To me, attendance or lackthereof boils down to 3 major factors.
1. Culture
This is probably the most important thing and hardest to cultivate. At the end of the day, creating an atmosphere and reputation that going to the basketball games is part of the school identity and college experience for the students. For instance, it is statistically impossible that every student who gets accepted to Duke just so happens to be die hard basketball fans. Rather, the more likely scenario is that they become fans as part of the culture of the school engrained for decades. I had a friend at UR who had gotten into Duke for a grad program. He never once went to a single UR basketball game (maybe except against VCU). While he was still a student at UR, he learned of his acceptance into Duke. I remember him wearing a Duke shirt and rooting for them in March Madness lol.
Now what is something that can help build the culture? That leads me to the second point
2. The games itself, which can be broken down to 2 parts
Part A is the competition of games. There’s one thing to have games against other top teams that inherently generates excitement and then there’s games against VMI and Gardner Webb. I had another friend who went to Duke for undergrad. He said tickets to the top ACC games were very hard to get and they do something that involves sleeping in tents for tickets. For random OOC games, anyone could practically get tickets. Now for UR, we aren’t in the ACC but A10 still has a lot of great competition and big names. I imagine we will have a greater attendance come conference play than we did OOC.
Part B, is winning. Got to win the games. The more you win, the greater buzz it generates. Sustained winning over years is what then formulates expectations and the foundation of a stronger identity and gravitation towards student involvement at games. Loyola is a great program and has no attendance this year. I saw a tweet that even Georgetown has not had a lot of student attendance either
3. Our student size
While I take immense pride in having a strong academic profile with a smaller student body and tight knit community, the fact is this will be a limitation for us for high attendance. I don’t care if it’s UR, Duke, or Ohio State, there will always be a higher percentage of students who don’t want, can’t, or care to go to the games than students that do. The problem is that 20% of the student body is still as significant amount and more than enough to fill seats at those schools. At UR, we need probably like 30-40% to completely pack the student section. That’s hard to do.
It also means that there are fewer students who want to be part of things like the Richmond Rowdies. That was a strong presence in the early 2000s. It was there when I was a student but a lot less, and now it’s virtually non-existent.
At the end of the day, the priority should be to build a program that has sustained success and goals of playing tough competition out of conference and in conference. If we do that, the rest will follow.
I was at this game 10 years ago (video below). Just 2 years ago, the atmosphere against Dayton was tremendous too. UR has it within them to be have a strong basketball culture with students like other schools, we just need to bring it out.
