University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Crowded House
February 28, 2012 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
Feb. 28, 2012
By Adam Lucas
Dwindling Atlantic Coast Conference basketball attendance has been a national story over the past two weeks. But it's not the case in Chapel Hill.
A recent Washington Post report revealed the ACC is averaging 9,406 fans per game this season, which would be the lowest average since the 1984-85 season, and the first time it has been below 10,000 fans since the 1988-89 campaign. If the average holds, it would be the fourth straight year the average has declined.
Smith Center attendance had also experienced a recent dip. After an average of 21,035 fans per game during the highly anticipated 2009 campaign, attendance failed to crack the 20,000 average for the next two seasons. But even with a home schedule with several negatives--no marquee non-conference game, multiple 9 p.m. or later starts and a nine-game homestand in December--attendance has increased nearly five percent over last year's figures, with the Tar Heels averaging 20,066 through 17 home dates.
Barring a freak snowstorm tomorrow that holds down the attendance in the 2012 Senior Day against Maryland--hey, weird weather has happened before against the Terps--the total number of fans through the Smith Center turnstiles this season will be the highest single-season total in the building this century.
Carolina has been the exception to the ACC trend. The Tar Heel average attendance is greater than the combined average attendance at Duke, Miami and Georgia Tech, where the combined average is 18,090.
The head coach has noticed.
"Our crowd this year has been sensational," Roy Williams said after the last home game, a win over Clemson. "There've been articles on attendance and college basketball being down and our crowd has been phenomenal all year. Ticket office people, marketing people, everybody should be congratulated on trying to look ahead and see potential problems. We had a nine-game stretch at home, a lot without the students here, and our attendance is up from last year. Again, I thank our crowd. They've been sensational for showing up and there is only one left. It's senior night in a couple of weeks, but the crowd has been sensational."
Part of the success is due to the sheer size of the Smith Center. Since 1986-87, the first full year of the facility's operation, Carolina has ranked in the top five in average attendance every season except 2002 and 2010. Through the sheer number of seats--capacity has changed from 21,444 when the building opened, to 21,572 in 1992, to the current 21,750 in 2000--the Tar Heels have quantity other schools don't have.
But Carolina's average attendance is still 92.3% of capacity. The league schools with the next-biggest facilities, NC State and Maryland, have played to capacities under 75 percent this season. Only ten other ACC crowds across the conference have been larger than Carolina's smallest home crowd this season--15,623 on a Tuesday night in December to see Evansville. Of those 10 other league attendance figures bigger than the Evansville game, two of them were Carolina road trips to other schools that mark those venues' biggest crowds of the season. Of UNC's seven ACC road games so far this year, all seven have resulted in at least a tie for the biggest home crowd of the season for that particular school.
Carolina's home attendance success this season was helped by high preseason expectations for the team, but it wasn't simply a matter of throwing open the doors and waiting for fans to arrive. As soon as the home schedule was released in August, the Tar Heel ticket office and sports marketing department identified the nine-game homestand as a potential trouble spot. With students gone for part of those games and no highly ranked opponents in that stretch, the staffers got creative and came up with some aggressive plans to fill the building. The school ran a Black Friday ticket promotion, and Texas tickets were bundled with other games in December to boost attendance. With students frequently failing to pick up their regular allotment in past seasons, that figure was continually adjusted this year to make sure the proper balance of student and general public tickets were available.
The result? In a year when attendance has been a topic across the ACC, it's also been a significant story in Chapel Hill--but for a very different reason.
Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly. He is also the author or co-author of six books on Carolina basketball, including the official chronicle of the first 100 years of Tar Heel hoops, A Century of Excellence, which is available now. Get real-time UNC sports updates from the THM staff on Twitter and Facebook.
