Shortly after Mississippi State’s 69-44 home victory over Vanderbilt Thursday night, the Lady Bulldogs’ official Twitter account sent out this message:
Well, blow me down.
It’s not much of an exaggeration to note that the Lady Bulldogs attracted just a few more fans in a season as those who showed up at Humphrey Coliseum for that one weeknight game. I’ve been in the building when there may have been a couple of hundred souls, max.
Starkville is a very small town that anyone who’s covered anything in the SEC knows is hard to get to, and even harder to return from.
For many years MSU was one of the worst major college women’s programs in the land, and you wondered if anybody on the athletic department staff cared to do something about it. (At SEC Media Day one year, I was asked if I could pose a few questions to the then-head coach, who played to a near-empty room).
Such was the state of this program, until the late 1990s, when future four-time All-American LaToya Thomas arrived and made MSU respectable on the court. Former coach Sharon Fanning-Otis deserves much of the credit for this turnaround too, as she got out not only in the Starkville community, but the northeast Mississippi region that includes Columbus and Tupelo (she later married a former mayor of Tupelo).
Her team started drawing in the four digits, but typically needed a home game with Tennessee to get its best turnstile count of the season.
Current coach Vic Schaefer, who has a weekly luncheon with boosters, fans and civic leaders, told me at this season’s SEC Media Day he wanted to achieve a number of attendance and season-ticket goals, and some already have been met.
He boasts a lock of an NCAA tourney team (22-2, ranked 18th) with the chance to play host to first- and second-round games. He’s also got a budding instate star in freshman forward Victoria Vivians, who averages 14.5 points and has been mentioned in the same breath as Thomas.
The 50,000-fan milestone (that’s with 15 home games, more than anybody in the SEC except Alabama) translates into a season average of 3,363, sixth-best in the 14-team conference. That may still not sound like a lot of bodies, but all of the SEC games in Starkville have been played during the week.
MSU will have home games in February against Texas A & M, Florida and Ole Miss that ought to boost their attendance substantially. The Lady Bulldogs have to go on the road to play the biggest home draws in the league, this Sunday at Tennessee and Feb. 26 at No. 1 South Carolina.
What the Gamecocks have done on the court has been tremendous, and they lead the nation in attendance for the moment, as well as in the rankings, pulling in nearly 12,000 fans a game. Dawn Staley has done what Val Ackerman, in her 2013 white paper on women’s college basketball was adamant about — coaches must become the very visible faces of their programs — by exhaustively promoting that program in Columbia and across the state.
Before last season, Staley set specific attendance goals — she wanted to get to an average of 5,000 — and fans did better than that, turning up for an average of 6,371 that was 10th nationally. This season, the lowest crowd has been 8,823 (for North Carolina Central!). On Monday, Carolina drew 13,546 in a rout of Texas A & M.
But having a good team isn’t enough. The website for the Syracuse Post-Standard posted a story Thursday with suggestions from a men’s and women’s season ticket-holder about how to boost attendance for the Orange women’s team.
While Syracuse has been nationally ranked on the court, the team averages a grand total of 649 fans per home game — you read that right, six-hundred forty-nine — the lowest for any team in a “Power 5” conference.
That post drew 348 comments — a little more than half the home draw. Few were especially valuable, but people did chime in.
Earlier, the Daily Orange student paper talked to coach Quentin Hillsman and athletics department officials about the issue, and I didn’t get the sense they’re on the same page at all. Here’s Floyd Little (the former Syracuse star and Pro Football Hall of Famer), now a special assistant to the athletic director:
“I’ve seen schools do a better job of promoting their team. We could do a better job of supporting our women’s basketball team.”
Here’s Hillsman, now in his ninth season who’s had back-to-back NCAA teams and six 20-win seasons:
“We can’t get into who’s showing up and who’s not showing up.”
A big part of the problem is that the Carrier Dome, where the women have played since 2007, is far bigger than they will ever need. There’s absolutely no atmosphere. Manley Field House has been converted for other uses, so there’s no place to go.
But in lieu of any long-term facility resolution, there are plenty of things that can be done that don’t seem to have been tried at Syracuse. The Orange used to get their best draw — 4,000 or so — when UConn came to town during their Big East years.
The Huskies have the national player of the year in Breanna Stewart, who hails from — hey, look at this! — Syracuse, N.Y. Why haven’t they been on the schedule? She has one more season after this one, but it’s too late now to change that.
UConn has wanted a homecoming game for Stewart, and next year they will travel instead to Colgate, about an hour from Syracuse. That crowd would have belonged to the Orange. What a missed opportunity.
Call up the athletic departments and coaches who are contradicting what sounds like a bunch of excuse-making at Syracuse. A solid program has been built, and it needs to take a couple of more steps up on the court. But this isn’t the “Field of Dreams.” You have to do more for fans to come. A lot more.
Now that Syracuse is settled in the ACC, it’s more than time to get cracking. You draw a measly 2,158 for Notre Dame — Notre Dame? — and say you “can’t get into who’s showing up and who’s not showing up?” Well, whose job is it to “get into” that?
Has anyone at Syracuse read the Ackerman Report? Do they know what it is? Was anyone representing the Syracuse program at the coaches marketing symposium at last year’s WBCA convention? If so, what did they learn that could be put into action?
Or is this going to be up to Floyd Little — Nuhmbah 44, Denvah Broncos! — who attends many women’s games, home and away, to push this along?
If fans can come in record numbers in Starkville and Columbia, S.C., and Ames and Spokane and Corvallis and Lincoln and other such outposts where women’s teams have ignited their communities, surely they can come to Syracuse.
