Two More Ideas On Raising Awareness Of Bruin Athletics For The 'Average' UCLA Student

Bumped. This is good stuff. Keep the ideas coming. GO BRUINS. - N

One way of thinking about raising attendance is binary - find some people who don't attend and find ways of inducing them to attend. 'People don't go to games because tickets can't be transferred - tickets need to be transferable, and then problems will be solved'. In basketball, where the stadium is easily accessible and capacity is small, this may make sense.

Another way is to think about fan commitment on a sliding scale, and imagine there is a distribution with some number of hardcore fans, some number of somewhat committed fans, some number of fairweather fans, and some number of people with no interest (this isn't meant as a definitive schema, just for illustration). If you can shift some people from being 'somewhat committed' to being 'hardcore' you raise attendance, but shifting people from the large group of fairweather fans into being 'somewhat committed' raises average attendance as well. So, a relatively small change in support across the whole distribution could increase average student attendance significantly. I think this especially applies to football.

With that in mind, I have one small and easy area in which the school administration could make a contribution.

In a number of eating areas on campus, tv screens small and large have a variety of programming playing through the day. As a grad student 2004-2006, I found it incomprehensible that these screens would not be showing every UCLA football/basketball away game. If you are on campus working on a weekday evening or on a Saturday, UCLA sports should be easily accessible to you, whether you actively want to be able to sit and watch whole games as a somewhat committed fan, or whether you ought to be semi-voluntarily exposed to parts of games when taking a study/work/food break.

I would go further, and have game highlights/recaps from the previous weekend playing at lunchtimes (or, at the very least, one lunchtime a week - I can understand if an academic institution does want to play CNN some of the time), so that awareness is passively raised among all students. If a game is on, you are likely to find yourself rooting for your school even if you aren't that invested... and over time, that will make you more likely to go to a game. Same applies all the way across the distribution of fans - some disinterested people become fairweather fans, some somewhat-committed fans become more hardcore, etc. When it comes to getting 'critical mass' for a tailgate at the Rose Bowl, having all your friends be slightly more aware could change a small gathering of hardcore fans into a big event taking on momentum of its own.

So, while the 'average' UCLA student is not currently a huge hardcore fan, raising the awareness of all students just a little bit is potentially both feasible and productive. I don't claim that my specific suggestion above is a panacea, just one of a number of small steps that could collectively make a big difference.