Steve Zmrhal and Matt Johnson don’t play for the Northwestern men’s basketball team, but they put on uniforms and follow the same routine before every home game.
Zmrhal dons the purple Wild Side T-shirt he received for buying season tickets and paints his face in school colors — purple on the right, white on the left. The McCormick senior ties on the bandanna he fashioned from another NU T-shirt, then tops it with a large, black cowboy hat. Johnson, a Weinberg senior, sports a less elaborate get-up, but with one key element: the trusty cowbell he uses to lead cheers.
The roommates arrive at Welsh-Ryan Arena at least an hour before tip-off to secure front-row seats — even though the rest of the student section and building is nearly empty.
Zmrhal, a four-year football season ticket-holder, has missed only a handful of basketball games since his freshman year. Johnson estimates he has missed one home football game and one basketball game in four years. Neither sees NU’s losing athletic history as a deterrent — in fact, both enjoy rooting for an underdog.
Neither Zmrhal nor Johnson are likely to miss a game to do homework.
“It would take two finals on the next day to keep me away from a game,” Johnson said. “And even then, I’d probably go and just pull an all-nighter.”
Neither Weinberg junior Patrick Min nor McCormick sophomore Rachel Lee, on the other end of the spectrum, ever have attended an NU sporting event.
Lee doesn’t consider herself a sports fan and would rather concentrate on academics or student-group activities, although she hopes to go to one game before graduating. Min’s older brother was a member of the famed “Cameron Crazies” basketball student section at Duke. He likes sports but shies away from NU games because, he says, “It’s hard for me to justify putting in that much time at a game if I know they’re not going to win.”
Most students fall somewhere in between these extremes. Truth be told, most will never attend a men’s basketball game, and only a slight majority will see a football game. Explanations for the lack of student attendance center around campus social segmentation and a lack of tradition — inevitably drudging up the buzzword that often defines NU’s student body: Apathetic.
However, recent signs of hope on the gridiron and court alike, as well as a potentially groundbreaking idea from an Associated Student Government senator, finally could buck the trend, keeping the superfans coming and convincing less-interested students that sporting events are worth a part of their study time.
Dollars and Sense
Sara Whitaker stands halfway up the Welsh-Ryan student section, between NU’s Marching Band and the Wild Side faithful — including Zmrhal and Johnson. Whitaker’s eyes hardly leave the court, where NU is quickly falling behind perennial power Michigan State, as she describes the 7 a.m. meeting at Einstein Bros. Bagels that spurred an idea that could change both the financial and opportunity costs of attending NU sporting events.
An ASG sorority senator who also works with the athletic department, Whitaker met with Chris Boyer, NU’s assistant athletic director for marketing and sponsor services, after students protested the Fall Quarter increase in single-game ticket prices from $8 to $15, a change that occurred under former Athletic Director Rick Taylor. Current AD Mark Murphy, in turn, allowed each student to bring one nonstudent for the same $15 price.
That wasn’t enough for Whitaker. Friends at other schools told her how students there were charged a flat athletics fee with tuition, allowing free admission to all sporting events. Whitaker decided to crunch NU’s student attendance numbers from 1997 to 2002. She found the average student spent just $19.40 on sporting events each year — roughly the equivalent of one football and one basketball ticket at current prices.
So Whitaker — along with other ASG members, football captain Jason Wright and basketball captain Jitim Young — authored a bill that proposed adding a $25 athletics fee to tuition to allow students into games for free. The bill passed at the end of Fall Quarter and is awaiting approval from administrators and NU’s Board of Trustees.
Student reaction to the bill has been mixed, and it remains to be seen whether, if passed, the fee will attract students who otherwise would not attend sporting events.
“If I’m not going to go to any games anyway, I would rather put that $25 towards a couple of meals, or a couple of movies,” said Communication freshman Blake Spence, who has yet to attend a football or basketball game.
“I think it’s great,” Weinberg sophomore Jonah Enbar said at the Michigan State game. “I have a lot of friends who spend all their money on beer, so if games are free they can still buy beer then drink it before the game.”
come Together
Head football coach Randy Walker might be close. Murphy, maybe. But it’s difficult to imagine that anyone else in the athletic department has a more difficult job than Boyer.
Boyer is in charge of promoting and planning gameday events for all 19 varsity sports in more than 100 home events every year and dealing with more than $1 million in corporate sponsorship from between 40 and 50 companies. All this with a staff of just two people: Assistant Marketing Director Tracie Hitz and a program assistant.
Moreover, the marketing department is often judged based on raw attendance numbers — even though NU’s student body is four times smaller than the Big Ten school closest in size, Iowa. Boyer shuns criticism because the percentage of NU students who attend games measures up to that of any other school in the conference.
Boyer and Hitz probably have spent more time than anyone else analyzing lack of interest in NU athletics. They don’t see the financial concerns that might be alleviated by Whitaker’s bill as the biggest obstacle in marketing to students.
Boyer said he never would have imagined schoolwork as a significant reasons for bad student attendance, but he has found that to be true at an academically elite institution like NU.
“I’ve actually seen cheerleaders studying during halftime of basketball games,” Hitz said.
Isabel Espaldon, a Communication freshman, owns men’s basketball season tickets, but she has yet to attend a game because she didn’t know when they were, and was unaware of the shuttle service to Welsh-Ryan.
Boyer said Wildcats sports aren’t underpromoted — fliers and newspaper ads should alert students to game times and special events.
“I had one student tell me he could see a flier for a game 500 times,” Boyer said. “And that’s just 500 times he would decide not to go.”
Boyer and Hitz commissioned five students in the Kellogg School of Management to conduct a market analysis in June of 2002 of NU sports spectators. The study showed most students either don’t like sports or don’t like NU as a whole. The pride of being an NU student is the most significant factor in deciding whether to attend games. This hints at the root of campuswide disinterest: a social division among students.
Several students said they felt the campus was divided into specific groups — techies, frat boys, theatre freaks, jocks, etc. So not only do students fail to connect with athletes, one of the more isolated groups on campus, they also don’t identify themselves as part of a larger NU community.
“As a general theme over the last 40 years, that has been true,” said sociology Prof. Bernard Beck, who arrived at NU in 1965. “For a school that isn’t all that large, it has often felt that it was impersonal and didn’t have a central identity.”
Beck said most students come here for individual purposes, not to be part of a larger group.
Administrators have said they are aware that a stronger campus identity is important to future alumni donations. Sports could be a way to get students to feel they belong to NU, Whitaker said.
Morgan Weed, a Communication fr
eshman and theatre major, said students don’t attend sporting events for the same reason few students outside the theatre community attend plays — they have nothing in common with performers.
For ASG and Whitaker, the $25 athletics fee is part of a larger effort to build a sense of community on campus. Her bill accompanies others with the same goal in the Northwestern Building Community Initiative passed Wednesday night.
Whitaker said she doesn’t hope to turn students into sports fans but to get them together in a social setting with the rest of NU’s student body.
“Athletic events are the best opportunities to get the most students together in one place,” Whitaker said. “You can’t do that in a lecture or a show.”
Winning woes
When Jitim Young played high school basketball at Chicago’s Gordon Tech, he could count on a packed house whether the team was successful or struggling.
“Even when we were down, the fans would get into it and help us get back into the game. You felt like you had the school behind you,” he said. “At Northwestern you play a home game and it almost feels like a practice — unless other teams’ fans come in here and they’re louder than ours.”
It’s the chicken-and-egg argument of student attendance, the catch-22 that contributes to the cycle of bad teams and a worse fan base. Teams don’t play well, which decreases attendance, which hurts home-court advantage and is a turn-off to potential recruits, which results in more losing teams. Basketball coach Bill Carmody has said the lack of a winning tradition is the biggest obstacle in turning the program around.
Students always have shown an uncanny ability to rally around worthy causes such as the Vietnam War protests, Stop the Hate rally Fall Quarter or NU’s 1996 Rose Bowl appearance that sent season-ticket purchases skyrocketing.
Boyer said he understands the influence of winning and losing on student attendance, but he won’t say his job depends on teams’ success. The marketing department’s mantra is to minimize the effects of winning and losing on attendance through aspects they can control — promoting events, creating a fun atmosphere and, if Whitaker’s bill passes, the affordability of student tickets. But the promotions are worthless unless people are there to enjoy them, Boyer said.
With the football team’s recent trip to its first bowl game since 2000 and the basketball team’s quickly developing sophomore class, the spark to ignite a renewed interest in athletics might finally have been struck.
“Whether you win or lose in this business it doesn’t affect the amount of hours you put into it, the passion you have for it,” Boyer said. “We don’t make millions of dollars. We work very bizarre schedules in that we have events on nights, weekends — everything. We come to work a lot of days knowing this place is going to be awesome when we win.
“And it is a matter of when, not if.”
