One idea on boosting football attendance

[ZachTheZip]

I had a converasation the other day with some friends about why there are so many OSU fans in NE Ohio. There are plenty of factors and most of them are out of our control. Of course, media exposure is the big one, but that won't be fixed unless we start winning. merchandising is another big one. OSU gear is accepted almost as its own brand where you can wear it anywhere and be accepted, and we don't have the capital to flood the markets and compete on that front.

So what can we do that we aren't doing already? Win? Duh. But what else? One of the factors for the huge number of OSU fans comes from the oversaturation of small colleges and universities in the area, like John Carrol, Tri-C, Oberlin, etc.. Tons and tons of people attend these colleges and are left with no high-level college team of their own to root for, so they default to OSU. OSU is far enough away that they can be seen as a major football option (they're not near the program enough to see that it's just another university) but close enough that they can be seen as the local college team. This is something that UA can capitalize on. They can become that option for major college football. To do this, we need to attract students from those schools to the football games.

I think we need to have a few "student ID nights" per year, maybe for every MAC home game. Show your student ID from another area college (and even high school; start them early) and they get a ticket for $5 in a seating section set aside for them to create another "student section"-type area. It lets UA students bring their freinds from other schools at a discount. It brings in people to campus and the stadium who would never normally come here and shows them what type of university we are, where they might just think of us as another small college like Ursuline.

[Big Zip]

I'm not sure it is going to work, but I think you need to sell the student tailgating experience. College students want a party.

[ZachTheZip]

I'm not sure it is going to work, but I think you need to sell the student tailgating experience. College students want a party.

That would hopefully be part of the marketing pitch. They could set up an area next to Zips Fest with more of a college feel, like what they had with SpringFest last spring. Throw in a beer garden and some official cornhole sets (maybe an organized tournament between the UA greeks and the visiting students) and students would come out in droves from both Akron and other schools.

[cms133@uakron.edu]

This would be awesome... if we won. I bring, or brought, people from other schools like OSU to games. We get killed, and by the end of the game we're so slap happy from losing we actually have a fun time. Hard to get people legitimately interested in our team when we lose so bad. I almost don't want my friends to see us play

[skip-zip]

In theory, I don't believe this is a bad idea. I just question whether Cleveland-area college students would make the hour drive to Akron, on a Saturday, to see MAC-level football. I still think it's difficult to convince a lot of people, especially at college age, that the college football world consists of anything else except two groups of schools......the top teams in the country in one group.....and everyone else in another. You wouldn't believe the number of younger people who still say to me, "Oh....Akron plays in the top division? With all of the big schools? Really?"

I still believe there are only two things that are ever going to change attendance significantly as long as we are in the MAC:

1) We do some big things that get us known nationally, such as knocking off a major school, or getting at or near the Top-25.

2) We are able to someday get into another arrangement similar to the Acme/Zip games, where our own local community comes out to a game as part of a big community gathering type of event that includes a lot more than just a football game.