|
notice a common thread among those top crowds, save the super-gimmicked SLU crowd last season?
All Arkansas teams ... most of them the intense crosstown rival, the other two probably our most hated rival.
Also, every last one of those is a conference game, late in the season when people are actually in full-scale basketball mode.
You can type on here til your fingers fall off, but we ain't recreating those crowds anytime soon. For one, those crowds were all helped tremendously by visiting fans. Until we get UALR or ASU in the house, that's not happening.
Even if we were to get Harding back on the schedule, I'm not sure it would draw like it did even at the end of the GSC days. It'd be an early-season, non-conference game with less meaning and many of our fans now suddenly look at Harding as inferior because they are D-II, and might be less inclined to turn out.
This was the one negative thing I knew would happen, at least for awhile, when we made the move – that basketball attendance was going to suffer. It is going to take awhile for the current fans to change their mindset and for a new base to not know any better. Most of our core basketball group grew up with our rivals being the old AIC opponents, and that's who everybody got excited to see. You don't replace decades-old rivalries overnight. And yeah, we're D-I but whoopdeedo. To the common fan, do you think a D-I UMKC or Jacksonville State or Lehigh or whatever has as much appeal as D-II Harding, Tech, Henderson, SAU, UAM, Delta State? Not even close.
In time, I can see a scenario in which we consistently get solid crowds during the Southland portion of our schedule. But in Arkansas, where football and deer hunting are king, people's minds aren't going to be on basketball before the holidays enough to come out en masse ... especially against the Ecclesias and Missouri Valleys of the world.
Idaho, for instance, may be the Bears' stiffest non-conference home opponent. But how many people around here, save the diehards, really care about seeing Idaho? Without firing up their roster, who can name more than one player from Idaho? Hell, probably quite a few folks don't even know Idaho's mascot. So yes, competitively it's a good, solid game with a team at or maybe a little above our level. But not enough people know and appreciate that, and thus to them it's just another bum game that can take a back seat to American Idol or Nip/Tuck or whatever is on TV these days.
For the longest, people in and around Conway have been able to fully appreciate college basketball on two levels ...
1. The Razorbacks, the SEC and absolute top-flight ball. This is exciting because it's the absolute best college basketball has to offer.
2. The AIC/GSC era, which was pretty good basketball, but also it was exciting because it was local basketball with many of the teams full of kids from various parts of Arkansas for a long, long time. And by the time it got away from that (though there were still plenty of natives dotting the rosters), the rivalries were so entrenched and heated that you could've trotted out Kenny G and the Teletubbies in green and gold uniforms and people would come watch them play.
Now we're in a gray area where we're (usually) playing better teams, but teams that aren't top-shelf nor recognizable. So, there's the problem. And there's no quick or easy fix.
|
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
