11/2 Quinnipiac

[RichH]

Q just lost a blue chip freshman to the CHL.

I guess the "going to class" part of college didn't work for him.

Since when did Quinnipiac start holding classes?

[Townie]

Maybe if we had more of this we'd have more cheering?

That's a bingo.  An obvious example: men's basketball attendance barely reached 1,000 before its 3-year Ivy dominance that filled Newman with "Newman Nation" t-shirts and heavy frat participation. Steve Donohue's miraculous success building a WINNING team filled the other 3,500 seats. Not surprisingly, attendance is now significantly down.

Many things noted here might contribute to waning enthusiasm and lower student attendance but remain peripheral to the core issue. In my experience, the majority of students are not die-hards. They attend athletic events to celebrate victory, not to demonstrate support for their struggling school-mates.

Just my $.02

[Jerseygirl]

And for the record, yes, I agree that the ushers are mostly the messengers interpreting and delivering the mandates of the higher-ups. I have no lever that high in University management, however, so I provide feedback where I can. The ushers can go fuck themselves if they target behavior that isn't directly in danger of harming someone else or interfering with the game. Billy will survive hearing some college kids cursing in unison. The Lynah atmosphere has not survived the chilling effect of capricious ejections. The damage has already been done.

Several years ago, I got to Lynah before the doors opened before a Harvard game, and just waiting around in the Bartels linking hallway near the usual ticket-taking spot, I was able to observe the pre-game pep-talk/meeting that Gene held with all the ushers.  The general message communicated was along the lines of "Assume every single one of those students is up to No Good. If you aren't finding any Bad Things they're doing/saying, you aren't doing your job. You have the power to remove anybody, and we'll have your back if there's resistance." My interpretation from witnessing that is that they're requiring the usher staff to have an adversarial mindset from the start, and then empowering and expecting them to act on that.

So in other words, Gene was being Gene. /shudder

[Rosey]

Maybe if we had more of this we'd have more cheering?

That's a bingo.  An obvious example: men's basketball attendance barely reached 1,000 before its 3-year Ivy dominance that filled Newman with "Newman Nation" t-shirts and heavy frat participation. Steve Donohue's miraculous success building a WINNING team filled the other 3,500 seats. Not surprisingly, attendance is now significantly down.

Many things noted here might contribute to waning enthusiasm and lower student attendance but remain peripheral to the core issue. In my experience, the majority of students are not die-hards. They attend athletic events to celebrate victory, not to demonstrate support for their struggling school-mates.

I would buy this as a plausible argument except that Lynah has been getting emptier and quieter at a pretty even clip. I would attend 1-3 weekends a year for about 8 years between 2004 and 2012, and over that time the crowd kept getting lamer (fewer students, emptier sections, students arriving later, students losing sync on the chants, chants getting increasingly banal and less creative, quieter, less energy overall, etc.), something that may have been obvious to me because I saw games so infrequently compared with frogs experiencing the boil slowly. It didn't seem to correlate especially much with the team's performance. To wit, I suspect if Cornell went on a tear and won the ECAC this year, next year's student section would definitely be larger, but would otherwise continue to be awful.

However, given the anecdote about Cameron, I am more willing to entertain that this is largely a generational thing. Goddamn hipsters are all nihilists. Zey believes in NOSSING!

[Trotsky]

I am more willing to entertain that this is largely a generational thing. Goddamn hipsters are all nihilists. Zey believes in NOSSING!

To be fair, they each have an unshakeable belief in the tremendous importance of one thing.

[RichH]

In my experience, the majority of students are not die-hards. They attend athletic events to celebrate victory, not to demonstrate support for their struggling school-mates.

And that's true just about everywhere. We are a nation of front-runners and bandwagon jumpers.  I can think of many examples, but the one that I'll present here is from the Washington DC Frozen Four in 2009. A few friends and I were talking about how it was too bad that the Nationals weren't in town, as going to baseball on the off-day had become a Frozen Four week tradition of ours. I remember bringing this up to some locals, and the response was "Why do you want go see the Nats? They suck."  My answer will always be "because I like baseball, and it's a fun thing to do," but fast-forward a couple years, add a Stephen Strasburg and a Bryce Harper, and suddenly it's all "NATITUDE IN THE DISTRICT!!!!"  The majority of people won't go to things unless there's a winner to watch.

Except the Cubs. They'll fill Wrigley for another 100 years, regardless of how bad they are.

[Trotsky]

Except the Cubs. They'll fill Wrigley for another 100 years, regardless of how bad they are.

The Washington Soon To Be Formerly Known as the R Words are like this, too.  But I don't know of many other teams that can hold a crowd despite a long strong of losing seasons, in any country.  Maybe a crowd that's as directed towards hooliganism as towards the team's performance, like Millwall or every Brazilian team down to the 6th division, is impervious to front-running.  But all other teams follow P.J. O'Rourke's Fundamental Theorem of Politics: wherever the cutest girls are going, that's who's winning.

[redice]

The truth is, whatever the DC people seeing in the athletic arena looks/smells a lot better than the political garbage that they have to live most days.   Given that reality during the workday, wouldn't that make one want to go to a sporting event and holler.... a lot??

[Trotsky]

The truth is, whatever the DC people seeing in the athletic arena looks/smells a lot better than the political garbage that they have to live most days.   Given that reality during the workday, wouldn't that make one want to go to a sporting event and holler.... a lot??

Congress or the Wizards.  It's a tough choice.

(Actually, they both have the same problem: the rest of the country keeps sending us has-beens and criminals.)

[BearLover]

Maybe if we had more of this we'd have more cheering?

That's a bingo.  An obvious example: men's basketball attendance barely reached 1,000 before its 3-year Ivy dominance that filled Newman with "Newman Nation" t-shirts and heavy frat participation. Steve Donohue's miraculous success building a WINNING team filled the other 3,500 seats. Not surprisingly, attendance is now significantly down.

Many things noted here might contribute to waning enthusiasm and lower student attendance but remain peripheral to the core issue. In my experience, the majority of students are not die-hards. They attend athletic events to celebrate victory, not to demonstrate support for their struggling school-mates.

Just my $.02

Disagree.  Most students have no idea how well the hockey team is doing.  They use the games as a social event and an excuse to get drunk.  I think everyone who really cares is already standing in Section B; it is the sorority girls and the facetimers are gone.  I echo the posters who have said it has been a long, steady deterioration.  I wrote Noel/Schafer an email; I encourage everyone else to do the same.  I don't have an easy solution, but something needs to be done.  I think it starts by decreasing ticket prices and making more sections GA.  

We can't let Lynah die.

[Swampy]

Maybe if we had more of this we'd have more cheering?

That's a bingo.  An obvious example: men's basketball attendance barely reached 1,000 before its 3-year Ivy dominance that filled Newman with "Newman Nation" t-shirts and heavy frat participation. Steve Donohue's miraculous success building a WINNING team filled the other 3,500 seats. Not surprisingly, attendance is now significantly down.

Many things noted here might contribute to waning enthusiasm and lower student attendance but remain peripheral to the core issue. In my experience, the majority of students are not die-hards. They attend athletic events to celebrate victory, not to demonstrate support for their struggling school-mates.

Just my $.02

Disagree.  Most students have no idea how well the hockey team is doing.  They use the games as a social event and an excuse to get drunk.  I think everyone who really cares is already standing in Section B; it is the sorority girls and the facetimers are gone.  I echo the posters who have said it has been a long, steady deterioration.  I wrote Noel/Schafer an email; I encourage everyone else to do the same.  I don't have an easy solution, but something needs to be done.  I think it starts by decreasing ticket prices and making more sections GA.  

We can't let Lynah die.

Why do they need an excuse to get drunk? ::drunk::

[David Harding]

Except the Cubs. They'll fill Wrigley for another 100 years, regardless of how bad they are.

Not even the Cubs are immune to falling interest total incompetence.  http://espn.go.com/blog/chicago/cubs/post/_/id/20159/attendance-in-2013-lowest-in-last-15-years

[kicksave]

Atmosphere aside, we missed Cole Bardreau on the PP and offense in general.

[Swampy]

Atmosphere aside, we missed Cole Bardreau on the PP and offense in general.

Absolutely. He brings more to the team than most other players.

+1

[billhoward]

Q just lost a blue chip freshman to the CHL.

I guess the "going to class" part of college didn't work for him.

Since when did Quinnipiac start holding classes?

Cornell claims to be the place where you can find instruction in any study. But can you take pole dancing as a for credit course? And that just points out an advantage schools like that have over Ivy Tower Cornell: better career preparation.