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As bad as my beloved Aces are this year we drew 6487 people for Illinois St.
5723 for Murray St,thanks to the Racers for bringing at least 1000.And we
had 4603for Bellermine. Nice crowds but not a fun team to watch.

I didn't realize the Redbirds were such a big draw!

The new guys AD Ziggy brought in have a done a nice job busting their rears marketing the team this year. Not an easy sell, but a marked improvement in effort.

I have said this before, but we had to get our administration in place before we could see results on the court. It's painful this year, but I do feel for once we have the right guys running things, especially President and AD. Below is a tweet from a local sportsguy after the game yesterday. AD's thanking fans may be common elsewhere, but nothing close to this has been going on here for at least the last 20 years. The culture has finally changed.

https://twitter.com/RandallParmley/stat ... 3Fpage%3D6

Good to see Evansville coming alive. Drake is slowly seeing Knapp Center improvements pay off. The last two games have gotten over the 3000 mark, up to 3510 for yesterday's game.

Next weekend, Bradley at Drake will be the first Saturday Night game at the Knapp Center since the November 2015. Back in the early 2010s Saturday Night games brought the best attendance for Drake. I hope we get a good crowd and Drake administration takes notice. Whenever Drake has had control over weekend game time they've really liked the 2:00 PM start time for some reason the last several years.....

Happy for those schools that are showing some interest in their attendance.

Missouri State is headed the wrong way and I'm not sure what administration thinks the solution is, or if they even care. We're down to 2,000 on a bad day and 3,500 or so on a good one.

They considerably knocked down the price of season tickets which did garner some interest but the walk-up crowd are probably worse than ever, so attendance just isnt good at all. Springfield is notoriously cheap and full of people that will only back a consistent winner, meaning NCAA tournaments. Heck the Bears have finished 3rd and 2nd (with an NIT) in the past couple seasons and attendance never really improved, It's actually gotten worse.

Another issue is that it's a huge arena and fans scattered all over the place so it lacks in atmosphere. They close off the upper bowl for Lady Bears games and I think a lot of fans would like to see them do that for the mens games as well. Would fill it up more down there and improve both atmosphere and appearances. They also need to make walk-up tickets as cheap as possible, concessions specials, whatever it takes. Need to give away free tickets to youth teams, elementary schools, etc just to get people in the door.

If we could get a conference contending team I could see UE drawing 8000 for a weekend game.
On a side note USI Evansvilles other D1 school is only drawing around 2800 for a game

I've been impressed by the attendance numbers for Evansville considering how much that program has struggled for as long as I can remember. Perhaps it has something to do with the basketball craze in that part of the state?

To further my previous post, Springfield is a weird sports town in that we'll get 7,000 in the arena for the championship games of the Blue and Gold local high school tournament. We'll have 10,000+ in attendance this Saturday at the Bass Pro Tournament of Champions high school tournament which draws teams from all over the country. So it's not that people don't care about basketball, they just dont care about the Bears. In addition a lot of the casual fans that used to buy tickets now feel content to just watch at home on ESPN+. I used to think this was exaggerated but I'm now convinced that is does in fact have a significant effect.

When I was a kid you could buy $3 bleacher seats for Hammons Student Center at local gas stations. That's how we got most of our tickets. I dont want to devalue the product on the floor but Ozarkers are notoriously cheap. If you want butts in the seats you might have to make some sacrifices.

Bulldog2323 wrote:Good to see Evansville coming alive. Drake is slowly seeing Knapp Center improvements pay off. The last two games have gotten over the 3000 mark, up to 3510 for yesterday's game.

Next weekend, Bradley at Drake will be the first Saturday Night game at the Knapp Center since the November 2015. Back in the early 2010s Saturday Night games brought the best attendance for Drake. I hope we get a good crowd and Drake administration takes notice. Whenever Drake has had control over weekend game time they've really liked the 2:00 PM start time for some reason the last several years.....

Why such a long gap on Saturday night games? Drake runs the Knapp, correct? I agree Saturday nights are huge. Our last Saturday night game was in December of 2019 against Murray State. No coincidence, it was the last time we cracked 7K for a game. Our problem is the management contractor for the Ford Center, Venuworks, owns the minor league hockey team. Guess who is playing on Saturday night? Hopefully the new AD and company take a stronger stance with negotiating dates, but we really have no cards to play as alternative venues.

USI at 2,800 is nothing to sneeze at in today's environment. Valpo had a little over 900 last week. I noticed Missouri State was indeed pretty light last week. I was a little surprised given the talent this year, and the past support they have always gotten. With the high school support you are getting there, I wouldn't think it is hopeless to get the crowds back. We don't sell upper deck or even end zones until the sides are sold. I agree that the larger arenas can be tough to get atmosphere at 30-40%.

It's probably because people are broke - especially right after the holidays.