PonyTime wrote:ponyinNC wrote:I still haven't heard anything that us out-of-towners could do to help. Aside from Mustang Club membership and occasional trips to Dallas or bowl locations, I'd like to do something to help attendance.
Go down to Winston Salem and find out how a school with an enrollment similar to ours, in a city much smaller than ours, and with Alumni spread out over a much farther area draws 26,000+ against Presbyterian, 28,000 for UL-Monroe, 28,000 for Liberty, and 29,000 for Gardner Webb.
Report back to Mustang Club HQ with new tactics that we should be utilizing.
LOL. Well, honestly I have been to a Wake home game, but it was against UNC so the visiting fan base (of which I was a part) was pretty substantial. I came very close to going to law school there, but decided to stay at SMU.
Wake has help in that they are the only game in town for an hour and a half in any direction. They get a lot of local fan support from residents that didn't attend Wake - much like Clemson gets from the surrounding areas of Greenville, Anderson and Spartanburg. Wake has a lot of local T-shirt fans, because it is the only athletic event in town. Dallas is such a different animal.
Wake students support their teams much better than we do - although that is against local rivals and a great conference that they've been a part of for decades. In other words, Wake reaps a lot of the same rewards that we did while part of the SWC - local, long standing rivalries with georgraphic fits that make it easy to attend both home and away games. Meanwhile, we play non-geographical fits like Temple, Uconn, USF/UCF, ECU, Cincy, Rutgers, etc.
For the games that you quoted above that do not feature ACC rivals, that attendance may be helped by student groups such as the "Screamin Deamons" -- Membership in the Screamin’ Demons includes t-shirts for football and basketball games. Screamin’ Demons also receive priority for the best seats at sporting events.
Bottom line - They are a BB school first, and always will be. FB is a stop-gap until BB season arrives. But they reach out to the local community in a way that we just do not / cannot. Much like TCU reached out to become Ft Worth's team, Wake is Winston Salem's team. For SMU --It is tough enough to try to become Dallas' team against every other pro sports, especially when you have America's team in your backyard and when Jerry Jones is hosting every great CFB matchup at Jerryworld.
