KeaneyBlue - The URI Basketball Forum

RoadyJay wrote:

Da_Process_Survivor wrote:

Taylor Swift wrote:
There were three empty seats down to the left of me (closest to the HC bench). Inexcusable.

So much of Rhode Island has backwards thinking. As much as people say "oh people from South County don't go north of the tower". I cannot tell you how many people north of Warwick never go to Warwick or south because it's also deemed "too far". I commute daily from South County to Providence and all in all it's an hour up each morning.

The Athletic Department desperately needs a marketing overhaul.

look no further than the Friars last year. Coming of 4 consecutive appearances and 1 year removed from a Big East Title...

We were their largest OOC attendance by 4,000...12,800 sell out.

The next largest OOC crowd was 8,310 for opening night against Vermont.

they had attendances of

4,208 against St Francis (32% capacity)
4,801 against NH (37% capacity)
4,069 against Wagner (31% capacity)
4,257 against Maine (33% capacity)

I guess we are sharing the same marketing practices

in that case we definitely need to change ours....cant do anything like that school. haha

just pointing out that garbage OOC opponents will never draw, regardless of the run of success the team is on.

Per the Athletics website, AD for Marketing is Matt Moeller. http://www.gorhody.com/information/staf ... eller_matt

Taylor Swift wrote:Per the Athletics website, AD for Marketing is Matt Moeller. http://www.gorhody.com/information/staf ... eller_matt

It says Associate AD so wouldn’t he be an assistant?

ramster wrote:

Taylor Swift wrote:Per the Athletics website, AD for Marketing is Matt Moeller. http://www.gorhody.com/information/staf ... eller_matt

It says Associate AD so wouldn’t he be an assistant?

I believe all of the ADs from the different departments are Associate ADs under Thorr

Da_Process_Survivor wrote:

Taylor Swift wrote:

RoadyJay wrote:I wonder how many other teams that are coming off a conference championship and at least one NCAA win have this type of attendance problem.

I haven't been able to go to the first two home games because my primary residence is now Florida but I made sure my seats were spoken for. I feel like I have a responsibility to make sure those seats are filled.

Also, because it's a game against Holy Cross on a Sunday we just shouldn't care? We should just accept this? Naaaa, we don't need to market this game.. We're not going to get many people anyway. Such Rhode Island thinking.

We as fans are to blame if we are not filling our seats and the marketing department is to blame by not putting butts in seats.

There were three empty seats down to the left of me (closest to the HC bench). Inexcusable.

So much of Rhode Island has backwards thinking. As much as people say "oh people from South County don't go north of the tower". I cannot tell you how many people north of Warwick never go to Warwick or south because it's also deemed "too far". I commute daily from South County to Providence and all in all it's an hour up each morning.

The Athletic Department desperately needs a marketing overhaul.

look no further than the Friars last year. Coming of 4 consecutive appearances and 1 year removed from a Big East Title...

We were their largest OOC attendance by 4,000...12,800 sell out.

The next largest OOC crowd was 8,310 for opening night against Vermont.

they had attendances of

4,208 against St Francis (32% capacity)
4,801 against NH (37% capacity)
4,069 against Wagner (31% capacity)
4,257 against Maine (33% capacity)

Yet I've never seen Koch, Donaldson or McNamara criticize their fan base for poor attendance.

Billyboy78 wrote:

Da_Process_Survivor wrote:

Taylor Swift wrote:
There were three empty seats down to the left of me (closest to the HC bench). Inexcusable.

So much of Rhode Island has backwards thinking. As much as people say "oh people from South County don't go north of the tower". I cannot tell you how many people north of Warwick never go to Warwick or south because it's also deemed "too far". I commute daily from South County to Providence and all in all it's an hour up each morning.

The Athletic Department desperately needs a marketing overhaul.

look no further than the Friars last year. Coming of 4 consecutive appearances and 1 year removed from a Big East Title...

We were their largest OOC attendance by 4,000...12,800 sell out.

The next largest OOC crowd was 8,310 for opening night against Vermont.

they had attendances of

4,208 against St Francis (32% capacity)
4,801 against NH (37% capacity)
4,069 against Wagner (31% capacity)
4,257 against Maine (33% capacity)

Yet I've never seen Koch, Donaldson or McNamara criticize their fan base for poor attendance.

yup, good ol PC Projo.

Funny enough, the attendance from our game saved their OOC attendance average.

Overall they averaged 6,323 (48% capacity) in the OOC
Remove our game and it drops to 4,935 (38% capacity)

URI alone boosted their OOC attendance average by 1,400 per game

To use the Holy Cross game as any kind of barometer of fan base support is misguided, especially as DaProcessSurvivor so nicely researched the Friars' own struggles just last year with these low-interest home games that drew in the low to mid-4000s in the 12k seat Dunk.

We know there have been record season tix sales, record mini plan sales, and generally high pre-game tix sales this season. We should see (we BETTER see) sell-outs for the critical games (not just PC), strong 6000+ loud games vs other important A10 opponents, and better than last year showings against the low-interest teams on the schedule.

It says so much that a "better" program like Providence, who operates in a whole other league financially and logistically, ALSO struggles to draw for crap home games following unprecedented sustained success.

We had one great season. It's not a on/off light switch that will start banging out the building every night. It takes time to build up the fan base after almost 2 decades of struggles. A whole generation of fans basically never experienced winning Rhode Island basketball. That's severely detrimental to the fan base.

Rhody Fans MUST give the team home court advantage for those key games that ultimately decide the A10 standings. If that means the Holy Cross game has 4k fans this year, that's fine as long as each year we see improvement in each class of home game.

I think you are all overthinking it.

Its November and it was nice out yesterday. There were tons of things going on in South County (as I said before) and basketball in the middle of the day might not fit. Add in the fact that Holy Cross is not a marquee opponent, EC Matthews isnt playing, and voila. URI will draw when the good opponents come to town and its cold out.

rhodysurf wrote:I think you are all overthinking it.

Its November and it was nice out yesterday. There were tons of things going on in South County (as I said before) and basketball in the middle of the day might not fit. Add in the fact that Holy Cross is not a marquee opponent, EC Matthews isnt playing, and voila. URI will draw when the good opponents come to town and its cold out.

Yeah, but not TOO cold....

Ok great, we have a lot of excuses. Don't complain when we can't sustain success the way you want. Don't complain if Dan leaves for a bigger program. You all want to be Gonzaga of the east with a half full building. If you're OK with attendance like yesterday accept that we're a middle of the A10 pack program.

I do not want to read attendance complaints all season.

RhowdyRam02 wrote:Ok great, we have a lot of excuses. Don't complain when we can't sustain success the way you want. Don't complain if Dan leaves for a bigger program. You all want to be Gonzaga of the east with a half full building. If you're OK with attendance like yesterday accept that we're a middle of the A10 pack program.

I think you went overboard with this post. One game against a weak OOC team projects URI to middle of the pack A10 program. Please.

No, but a consistently soft fan base, which is where we're at right now, means long term we will be a middle of the pack program. That's how it works.

RhowdyRam02 wrote:No, but a consistently soft fan base, which is where we're at right now, means long term we will be a middle of the pack program. That's how it works.

this is bonkers to me. You can't imagine that most people have plans and things going on mid day on a Sunday that are more important than URI playing holy cross?

On the list of most peoples priorities, I would imaging going to a mediocre college basketball game that URI was virtually guaranteed to win falls behind a lot of things.

And don't get me wrong, I want URI basketball to succeed and to draw big crowds and everything. But you gotta keep some perspective about it.

I do have perspective, a national one. That attendance indicates a soft fan base. Other fan bases don't say the weather was too nice or it was too bad. They don't say I had better things to do. They go to the damn game and support their team.

It amazes me. People on here can criticize anything and everything, but the second you accurately point out where we fall short people go nuts. Thin skin much?

RhowdyRam02 wrote:I do have perspective, a national one. That attendance indicates a soft fan base. Other fan bases don't say the weather was too nice or it was too bad. They don't say I had better things to do. They go to the damn game and support their team.

Does your national perspective recognize that attendance at live sporting events across the country is trending downward? Every sports league is battling attendance problems. Do you have solutions to this problem?

Not to mention (as others have) some of the particularities of URI's difficulty in drawing large crowds consistently.

Attendance complaints on this board sometimes seem to be a major, maybe misdirected yawwwnn...... Not sure there's any gain in complaining to this group about attendance. Would imagine that most everyone in this audience that can go to games...goes to games. We have season tickets and whenever I can get extras, I try to get them and get people (potential new fans) from our church or elsewhere to go. And that's probably also true of many others on this board.

So, when this phrase is used: Other fan bases don't say the weather was too nice or it was too bad. They don't say I had better things to do. They go to the damn game and support their team.

Who is that directed to? Sounds like it was directed at people that didn't go to the game...and I'm thinking there are way more "fans" that didn't go to the game that are NOT on this board, than those on this board. So, maybe need to find a way to direct that "get to the damn game" message to the audience of people that didn't go...this just doesn't seem like that place.

If you're going to complain about marketing, I get it. I bought PC tix for the dunk last year through PC and now I get more marketing info from them than URI. But, when you use statements like "they go to the damn game", that implies there are 'fans' at fault...and I don't know that it's this audience you're talking about...or what else this audience is supposed to do...

I always like looking through these. Kills me how low to the ground Fatts gets. It’s also always great to get shots of Will and Eric. The last one of JT dunking is tremendous- glad he held on.


http://www.photobyfriday.com/Sports/Bas ... oly-Cross/

rhodysurf wrote:

RhowdyRam02 wrote:No, but a consistently soft fan base, which is where we're at right now, means long term we will be a middle of the pack program. That's how it works.

this is bonkers to me. You can't imagine that most people have plans and things going on mid day on a Sunday that are more important than URI playing holy cross?

On the list of most peoples priorities, I would imaging going to a mediocre college basketball game that URI was virtually guaranteed to win falls behind a lot of things.

And don't get me wrong, I want URI basketball to succeed and to draw big crowds and everything. But you gotta keep some perspective about it.

People on here want to compare ourselves to Gonzaga, Dayton, VCU, etc, look at how many fans show up to their games even against low major teams.

Also I don't get the "mid day on a Sunday" excuse. You can find an excuse for literally every day/time of the week except for Friday and Saturday night. The issue is there are a lot of "fans" who only care about going to the big games rather than supporting the team for all games.

....and they're probably NOT on this board, so...round up the posse.....they ain't here....

josephski wrote: People on here want to compare ourselves to Gonzaga, Dayton, VCU, etc, look at how many fans show up to their games even against low major teams.

The key is that those teams are on the level we want to get to. No one is saying that we are there yet. It takes more than just one conference championship and one NCAA tourney win. It's just annoying to read all the whining about it after every non-marquee home game.

But I guarantee we'll all hear about it again when we don't break 6,000 for Brown, CofC, Iona, and FGCU...

^^ x1000

If we win two games this week I would imagine interest will increase. If we lose both, interest will decrease

theblueram wrote:If we win two games this week I would imagine interest will increase. If we lose both, interest will decrease

I'm willing to bequeath my avatar to you.

Gonzaga has a 6,000 seat arena and they sell out every home game
Dayton has a 13,435 seat arena and had 12,400+ against both D2 St Joseph's (IN) and D1 VMI last season
VCU has 7,637 seat arena and they sell out every home game

Damn right we aint there yet!

First two games this year each had an almost identical +300 more than their counterpart game LY. My thinking is this number ties very close to the increase in full season tickets that occurred. The mini pack sales increase is still yet to be seen as neither game played to date was part of offered plans. I unfortunately do not think we will see big numbers for games other than PC until mid January when the students arrive. I also think the recent injuries will prevent the team from meeting initial expectations in the OOC portion of the schedule and not drive upward momentum as was once hoped.

Personally, I didn't have time to drive an hour both ways in the middle of the day VS Holy Cross. I attend as many as I can, and you're right, missing two starters effects attendance a bit as well.

Others have already made the point, but what will drive real and lasting change to the attendance is sustained success. One year of meeting expectations isn't going to jolt the fan base to life like some seem to expect. A number of posters have made this same point over and over again, even going back to the Baron era - it will not just automatically happen overnight. Years like last year are necessary to change the long-term trend and it seems like last year has given a bit of a boost, which it should. But we need to repeat years like that over and over and stack them on top of other successful years in order to really change the culture of the fandom around the program. It didn't happen at VCU or any of these other places overnight, either. There isn't a one-season magic bullet.

RoadyJay wrote:Gonzaga has a 6,000 seat arena and they sell out every home game
Dayton has a 13,435 seat arena and had 12,400+ against both D2 St Joseph's (IN) and D1 VMI last season
VCU has 7,637 seat arena and they sell out every home game

Damn right we aint there yet!

not saying you dont have a point, but...

Richmond, VA - pop 220,000
Dayton, OH - pop 140,000
Spokane, WA - pop 215,000
Kingston, RI - pop 5,446

just a "small" factor to account for

sf2010 wrote:

josephski wrote: People on here want to compare ourselves to Gonzaga, Dayton, VCU, etc, look at how many fans show up to their games even against low major teams.

The key is that those teams are on the level we want to get to. No one is saying that we are there yet. It takes more than just one conference championship and one NCAA tourney win. It's just annoying to read all the whining about it after every non-marquee home game.

But I guarantee we'll all hear about it again when we don't break 6,000 for Brown, CofC, Iona, and FGCU...

I agree to some extent but I think it's more than winning games. Compare Providence with Dayton for example. How is Dayton able to get so many more fans? Both teams have a similar number of NCAA tournament appearances, both have been good programs recently, similar size cities and Providence also has the advantage of playing in a higher level conference. Yet Dayton has much better attendance than Providence. I might be completely wrong but I think Rhode Islanders don't care about college basketball as much as other areas so attendance will always be an uphill battle even if we are winning games.

Da_Process_Survivor wrote:

RoadyJay wrote:Gonzaga has a 6,000 seat arena and they sell out every home game
Dayton has a 13,435 seat arena and had 12,400+ against both D2 St Joseph's (IN) and D1 VMI last season
VCU has 7,637 seat arena and they sell out every home game

Damn right we aint there yet!

not saying you dont have a point, but...

Richmond, VA - pop 220,000
Dayton, OH - pop 140,000
Spokane, WA - pop 215,000
Kingston, RI - pop 5,446

just a "small" factor to account for

You are really only going to consider the population in Kingston, RI as our target demographic?

Population of Rhode Island: 1.056 million

This is OUR f***ing state!

Da_Process_Survivor wrote:

RoadyJay wrote:Gonzaga has a 6,000 seat arena and they sell out every home game
Dayton has a 13,435 seat arena and had 12,400+ against both D2 St Joseph's (IN) and D1 VMI last season
VCU has 7,637 seat arena and they sell out every home game

Damn right we aint there yet!

not saying you dont have a point, but...

Richmond, VA - pop 220,000
Dayton, OH - pop 140,000
Spokane, WA - pop 215,000
Kingston, RI - pop 5,446

just a "small" factor to account for

It's not local population alone, but you know its not as easy to fill seats as those larger cities when the arena can fit the entire town its located in, plus their dogs. Another issue is infrastructure. Rt 138 is a dirt road compared to Rt 95 for example if you're headed to a Friars game. Traffic backs up for miles because Kingston can barely handle the daily traffic. Plus if you want to head to a restaurant after, you're stuck in that same traffic all the way to the beach, since theres nothing more than a calzone within miles.

My opinion is we should be getting about 5k at worse for Holy Cross game , 4309 is too low

After seeing those low PC crowds too I think it will be hard to get the number high

Marketing needs to get better

......maybe college hoops is a niche sport, except for March Madness, and except where the strong followings of “big” programs have that multi generational tradition/success, strong identity and strong local affiliation with college/university.......and students that live and stay on campus where the part time job and/or relationship is too far away......and students attend the games because it is a campus happening......I think we are missing some of these elements in the challenges to significantly increase the fannies in the seats......one year of success is not gonna change those challenges.....

We have to win 22-25 games every year......for four or five years....we have to get to the NCAA tournament 2 out of every four years.....we need to beat providence more than once in a century,,,,,until then we will play to a base of 4300....with an occasional 6000 for Dayton, VCU or another team who gets hot in the conference....it will also help to win some OOC games against "name" teams......not just come close and lose by 5...

Yes I tend to agree with these last 2 posts it's hard to get out of where we are. Too many factors go into attendance.

I feel like people don't have an appreciation for how hard it is to build a really good program - the kind that fills the building every time no matter when the game is played or who it is played against. If it were as simple as having a great month and making the tournament, there would be a lot more really good programs than there are.

I honestly believe that we have a dormant fan base waiting to be activated, even if they don't realize it yet. But it takes a while to activate them, especially when the program has been down and off the radar of the casual fan for almost two decades. Growing a large and loyal fan base takes years, if not decades. The core base of fans is honestly not that bad considering the size of the community the school resides in and the recent history of the program.

Obviously nobody is content with just maintaining that level of support, but the kind of support people seem to be expecting requires a sort of persistence from the program, building it a little more every year until all of a sudden you can't walk up to the window to get a ticket on a Sunday afternoon in November. It doesn't happen overnight, no matter how much we want it to, no matter how much the coach wants it to, no matter how much the beat guy lectures the fans who are likely already showing up at a high rate. It gives me no joy to say this, but it is the reality.

Just say for the sake of argument that yesterday's game was hosting St Mary's of Ca who is a top 25 team and perennial NCAA team though not a big name is the attendance a lot more ???

College sports in general aren't big in this part of the country. Do you ever hear either of the Boston sports talk stations talk about college football or college basketball? If anything, college hockey is the most popular sport in New England. At least they do mention the Beanpot (well, Dale does).

Maybe if we can actually meet preseason expectations during the actual OOC games? You have to win some meaningful games to show your real. Not a bubble team. We have big games on the schedule. Just win them. It will all work out. But if we lose the big games and win against teams like Holy Cross, that doesn't move the dial.

.......not to prolong the much traveled attendance discussion, but I will.....I posted a few years ago something to this effect....”if the A-10 Tourney returned to the campus venue of the regular season champ and we hosted that......it would not sell out the RC.....”

reef wrote:Just say for the sake of argument that yesterday's game was hosting St Mary's of Ca who is a top 25 team and perennial NCAA team though not a big name is the attendance a lot more ???

I gotta go with.....no

Ok so if I set over under 4700 for Brown on aTues 11/28 what you guys take ??

I think many of the points by posters explaining 4300 against Holy Cross have some validity, but for me it boils down to this....

Are we doing the best we can with the marketing dollars we have? Are we even spending sufficient dollars on marketing? Are we doing everything single thing we can to get butts in seats? What is our brand? Do we have a brand?

I believe the answer to these questions are NO, NO, NO, WE DON'T KNOW, and NO.

......under.....

reef wrote:Ok so if I set over under 4700 for Brown on aTues 11/28 what you guys take ??

We should crush 4700... The last two home games against Brown we had 5630 and 5015.

Kids will be there for Brown. I would hope we'll get 5300 or so.

Win a game later this week. That will help.

Maybe let's get into the Top 25 for a few weeks before we have a discussion on attendance.

Roady Jay is right, and anyone who doesn’t see his point is not paying attention, IMO. I’m well aware I’m an interloper here. This isn’t necessarily my team or school but what I’ve gathered from watching and listening to those involved is that, in addition to the normal budgetary things, there are way too many people in potential change-making positions at your school who are fine with the status quo, which handcuffs a lot of others. The stuff that Roady Jay is talking about would go a long way in making all the tedious have to be in the top 25, have to beat a top 20 team without your best player and best front court player, don’t slip or you lose it all, etc. talk lessen. If you consider yourself to be a good fan and are doing what you can to support the program in a way that fits your life situation- great, that’s tremendous. Don’t get your feelings all hurt because the discussion doesn’t apply to you. No need to go all #notallmen on this. If you’re on a stupid message board (like me! I’m stupid, too!) we can probably assume you’re all in, with notable exceptions who need not be named, of course.