Re: Why teams can’t win the NCAA championship
Re: Why teams can’t win the NCAA championship
Are there members of the staff whose job it is to promote the games on a regular basis? Beyond special events, are students being pushed, reminded or dragged to games? How much marketing is really being done to generate a fan base? I'm not intimately involved so I really don't know.
Also I'm not sure how much fan support plays a role into the success of a team.
The irony is that there are experts (professors) at the university in marketing, sales, PR, business, persuation, psychology, … and many other resources yet the university itself doesn’t seem to use them. Even if they do the ticket office is staffed with students who are ill trained, helpless, and are merely cashiers.
An example is at the U of MN, up until this year the best ticket was to buy a standing room only ticket for $5 (even though there was no chance of the game being sold out) and then sit or stand where you like because otherwise tickets were 8 or 9 bucks. If you did want to buy a season ticket you really had to work hard to find out how to get them, only to find out tickets were sold in such a haphazard method that the best seat available was worse than you’d get if you bought single game seats. I suppose since nobody goes, they figure why put in the effort to do the job right?
My observation of young adult fans is that most aren’t going to watch an athletic contest, they are going to an event in which they are trying/hoping to be as much a part of the event as the athletic participants. In a way, letting students in free is counterproductive, since it doesn’t cost anything, it has no value. The men’s game is the place to be, to be able to say you were there. They are afraid they’ll miss something their cohorts will experience if they don’t go. They want to be seen there. It’s similar to why young adults drive around, or walk around, seemingly aimlessly. They are searching for something, but don’t bother to ask what for because they don’t know either. Nobody goes to the women’s game because they know they won’t find anything there. Saying you went to a women’s hockey game doesn’t register, nobody goes, so nobody cares if you were there or not.
I kind of like that, no standing in line to buy an expensive ticket. No kid that drank too much cheap booze before coming and is now creating a disturbance that interferes with enjoying the game. No distraction or difficulty breathing because a young woman is sitting by me wearing a half bottle of some putrid perfume and talking endlessly about something nobody wants to hear except her bored friend who doesn’t like hockey anyway.
