Incentives for Game Attendance

[smazza]

Who is in charge of sports marketing now??

has such a person ever existed at usf?

[Joe]

You gotta look at it this way too. Texas A&M has one of the most committed fanbases in the country. Their football team is usually average at best, but they still have always managed to sellout and be in the top 15 in attendance nationally.

Their baseball team has always drawn top 10 nationally and well even when their basketball team was 1-15 in conference play they still had a good fanbase there.

I would like to see USF implement something like this, but I'm not sure there is enough interest to get 1000+ out to a softball game at this point.

[Guest]

I dunno,  it seems to me like you'd get more "already" FB and BB fans to baseball and soccer (etc) games than creating new fans of any sport. would a free t-shirt drag somebody off the streets (who previously wasn't a BULLS fan) to go to games???    I still think winning is the only way to truly convert anyone.

Winning won't get people out to the Olympic sports... (see also: Softball, Women's Basketball, Men's Soccer, Volleyball -- over the years all of these programs have had some solid seasons... but not a lot of fans)

[CoolBull1]

Who is in charge of sports marketing now??

has such a person ever existed at usf?

Hopefully as of three weeks ago...yes.

[CoolBull1]

Good job to the Bulls Club on this one too....

[JoeB]

I think it would be a great way to get more students out to games.  The more students you get now, the more fans you'll have in 5-10 years.

[JoeB]

cool idea, but could be pretty costly to be giving out authentic baseball jersey's to everyone that goes to 36 athletics events.  

Velcro, it doesn't sound like much, but attending 36 games is a chore.  The baseball team had 38 home games this year.  I probably went to about 15 of them, and I still would have my work cut out just to get to that 36 limit.  Also, if 36 is too small a number, USF could make it any number they want within reason.  Football you'd only be able to rack up 6 or 7 a year if you count only home games.  Most people can't attend events in the afternoon when most of the softball and soccer games are.

Whatever group is running it could set up a table at each sporting event and have a couple of students work the table and keep track of who signed in.  The backend processing would be a chore due to the manual tabulations though.  Or if you make it electronic, you could have stand alone machines (like an ATM) at each event, where you could swipe a card to show you were in attendance.  This one would have more cost as you'd need to issue cards with a magnetic strip and machines that were programmed to a certain set of regs, but it would be alot smoother to run and record data.