Here's a start:
Average Annual Attendance
10 Year Period
Women's Hockey NCAA Champion Schools + Penn State
Wisconsin 2,164
Minnesota 1,936
Minnesota-Duluth 1,177
Penn State 550
Clarkson 442
Ohio State 439
Notes:
1. These numbers are based on the USCHO stats; link provided by ARM.
2. For a variety of reasons, all of these numbers are likely to be a bit high. At the most basic level, there's an obvious incentive to pad the numbers by counting people working the game, and so on. There's no corresponding incentive to under-report.
3. Another problem is paid no-shows. It's certainly legitimate for a school to report money in the till. Nevertheless, remember that MinnOTB believes that at some UMD games, paid no-shows could account for half of the reported attendance. But I'm interested in the number of fans actually in the building. In other words, "scanned tickets," or "drop count." So it's hard to know what to make of the UMD number.
4. Here at Ohio State, admission is free. So there's literally no scanned ticket number. Sometimes it looks like the "count" amounts to "the usual crowd is here, so use the usual number."
5. As per robertearle, Wisconsin numbers may be the most misleading of all. Fill the Bowl numbers just skew the results. Fill the Bowl might very well be an idea worth swiping. But for the current topic, I'm interested in the average number of people attending
in LaBahn. Also, selling the same seat twice may put more $$ in the till, but it doesn't put more people in the building. For Wisconsin, I used either the reported attendance OR the building capacity -- whichever was lower in the given year.
6. My numbers actually go back 11 years. The smattering of reports for 2020-21 -- the pandemic year -- are completely meaningless. So I went back to 2012-13 to get a tenth year.
7. I added Penn State to the mix. Partly because they're a Big Ten Sister School, and partly because they represent the state of the art option for having both teams share the same rink.
Discussion:
1. Wisconsin and Minnesota lead the way, drawing approximately 2,000 fans per game. Matching that number is a fine goal. Claiming that we at Ohio State will easily exceed 2,000 seems like a dubious claim.
2. UMD and Penn State play in state of the art arenas, with seating capacity designed for the Men's program. The Penn State number doesn't look all that different from the Ohio State number (humble building) or Clarkson. (nicer building with smaller overall capacity) UMD is higher, but as per Note #3 above, it could be that the in-house attendance actually fits in with the other schools in this second tier. Meaning attendance in the 400-600 range. Or, you can accept the UMD number as is, and consider the Bulldogs in a tier of their own.
3. I'm good with the goal of "not turning people away." To pursue that, you need to have number of seats above the average number, in order to account for the biggest games. For OSU, building a rink with 400-500 seats wouldn't accomplish that, and would be a serious mistake. We've recently been reporting attendance in the 700-800 range. Given that some people have indeed been turned away, I conclude that we need at least 1,000 seats right now. Perhaps putting OSU in a grouping with UMD.
4. With a neat new building, you'd certainly expect attendance to increase. But the Penn State experience with a neat new building suggests that for Women's D-1 Hockey, that increase is likely to be in the hundreds, not the thousands. If you build it, they will come. But necessarily in huge numbers. What does that mean for OSU? This is just a guess. But maybe after the shiny new toy phase wears off, perhaps an extra 400-500 fans per game?
5. So far, I'm at 1,500 seats, with a need to consider future growth.
Up Next: Attendance Trends Over Time.
