The unofficial online home for fans of the Old Dominion University Monarchs. Part of Collegiate Sports Nation (CSN).

(09-12-2018 12:13 PM)monarx Wrote:  

(09-12-2018 11:00 AM)GotLabradors Wrote:  ODU definitely needs to start focusing on the current student population. I heard the average age of the ODU fan is.....well it's older than me and that's pretty damn old. Your current students are your future donors and season ticket holders. You have to get them hooked now as students so they will want to come back to campus and watch football.

It has to be a concern for the athletic department, and if its not, it should be. If you look around the stands for both football and basketball, the fans are in large part 40+ and caucasian. ODU has been quite diverse for decades, and had football for 10 years now. I would think we would see a lot more people in their 20s and 30s than we do, and would expect the fanbase to be much more diverse by now too. Perhaps ODU did better student engagement in the 80s and 90s than we've done in the last 10-20 years? We certainly won a lot of games and converted a lot of new fans during that time too. If something doesn't change soon, ODUs donor pool and fan base may dry up over the next 20-30 years.

Overall culture has changed a bit too.

1. We used to love competition and look up to athletes. Now we are glued to our internet devices and look at the jocks as "toxic masculinity" and "rape culture". It isn't as bad with basketball, but the game of football itself is currently under attack.

2. Women are also getting over 60% of the college degrees. I am too far removed from being an ODU student at his point, but when I was there, the men pretty much decided what was going on in a given night an the women showed up. Perhaps that has flipped.