(09-15-2013 09:06 PM)PTJR Wrote: (09-15-2013 08:40 PM)mjs Wrote: Attendance at the Texas League Championship game in Little Rock. Perfect weather and not even a hog game to compete against. You can get in the ballpark for 6 bucks. 8 bucks will get you a seat that would cost $100+ at a major league park. I'm now convinced that "winning" will solve all of UALR basketball's attendance problems...NOT.
Well one thing is very obvious to me. Unless there is something with a lot of pizzaz, this town won't turn out. Promotions help a lot too. The Travs have done pretty well for years with promotions to get people in the park. The money comes from concessions. That and something a lot more flashy than what we have had could work. It certainly did in the Newell years!
PTJR, you know better than anyone about the reality of the Newell years. Yes, we had occasional good and even a few great crowds. But, that was the exception and Newell was as frustrated by the lack of fan support as anyone- I can say that from first hand information as I somehow was asked to be on a board with some of the cities movers and shakers (Looking back, I really don't why other than maybe they wanted one "regular" really diehard fan). The State House Convention was a great venue that we filled a few times. But, lets be honest- it maybe held 2000-2500 at the most- it was smaller than the lower bowl at the Stephens Center. I was at meetings were Newell was trying to get the ends of Barton Coliseum curtained off to create a 4000 seat venue which wouldn't look so empty. He was rightfully sick over poor attendance. We had tons of promotions and ticket give-aways. On occasion they helped get people out to the arena. We even filled the arena once for homecoming against Mercer when Affiliated Foods was giving away a truck and groceries. But then the **** finally hit the fan when the Chancellor announced that the program would need to start supporting itself and said "Sell X number of season tickets or I'm shutting down the program". We sold 5200 season tickets (at 75 bucks each) and had really good attendance for exactly one year. Then the majority of those folks didn't renew and we were almost back to square one. Many folks seem to only remember the good crowds. I remember the pitiful attendance at the majority of our games, because it used to make me sick. I don't necessarily like everything about the way things are done now, but I guarantee you our revenue is much higher now than it ever was back then.
Poor attendance continued after Mike Hamrick took over and actually got worse. I think you knew Mike well enough to know how frustrated he was. He would try to get more folks out to games by a getting companies to "buy" a game. He would give them 100's of tickets to distribute for their donation. I assumed it was somewhere around 5000 bucks to buy a game- Let's assume it was as high as 10K, although I really doubt it. Still, Chris only has to sell 16 middle leather season tickets to generate that much revenue.
Rick Mello came in and didn't like giving tickets away because he did not want to "cheapen" the product. Unfortunately, it probably was too late for that. He decided to "stop feeding all our fans" before every game and that pissed people off as did messing with where people could park.
Chris came in and tried to make this "high class" program that would be attractive to the more "moneyed" people in Little Rock. If you see the folks at the annual SpectacUALR, you get the sense that it has worked. Unfortunately, most of those folks don't come to games- certainly not SAU, UAFS, and Grambling- on occasion they show up for ASU and WKU. At this point I don't have an answer. I would like to see more promotions simply because I want more fans at the games. I don't think any season ticket holder would be upset about tickets being given to kids, youth groups, servicemen and women, or veterans. Something needs to be done to get more butts in the seats. We saw today that even championship games don't do it in Little Rock. But we have to try to come up with something.
