HL Attendance

[wh]

We were 4th in average home attendance last year, behind Butler, WSU and Milwaukee.

http://www.daytondailynews.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/dayton/wrightstatesports/entries/2011/10/22/horizon_league_focus_league_ho.html

There are a lot of nice arenas in the HL with teams playing good basketball, and yet a lot of the attendance averages seem embarrassingly low.  Case in point - CSU.   One of the top ranked Mid Majors in the country, HL POY, competing for the conf. championship, and 3100 fans show up on average.  

[valpo84]

CSU is perennially disappointing with attendance. Classic case of an arena way too big for interest level. Nice arena but with the Q down the block why does one need to 15000 + arenas within a mile.

If you take out the Butler game the number probably drops more and throw in I think one decent home pre-conf game and they're probably lucky to have 2000 on any given night.

They suffer from (i) commuter school with a downtown arena -- once you're home who wants to drive back (it's a destination, plus parking, plus etc.), (ii) no media interest despite no winning programs professional or college for miles. This one baffles me as it is a successful program under Gary. Plain Dealer (which may be the worst big city paper in America) shows no interest and is more interested in OSU than anything else in the Fall/Winter, (iii) failure to adequately market -- their AD office has had turmoil and is just not very marketing/pr savvy. Town of couple million and don't seem to have any community outreach, (iv) competition for sports dollars in a poor economy - Cleveland has been hit hard, there are competing big colleges (Kent and Akron), and people are more interested in Cleveland to watch OSU than do something else, and (v) the weather in Cleveland has been terrible (trbl) the past 2 years so getting to games from the suburbs has been difficult so on those days forget any walk up traffic.