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Updates to the Joel?

mako1331 said:
Dean Smith was 55 years old in 1986.
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And he had been at UNC for 25 years and had 1 NCAA Championship, 7 Final Fours, 9 ACC Championships. He stayed at UNC for 11 more years and had 1 National Championship, 4 Final Fours, 4 ACC Championships. It doesn't appear that the arena made that much difference.
 
myDeaconmyhand said:
Disagree with DF7. Think the location of the student section is more important than expecting a large amount of students to show up. Just 100 students courtside changes the entire game experience, even if you can’t count on 500+ students attending every game. The best teams in the country have inconsistent student attendance because college students have much busier social lives than the adult fans that live locally. Also from my experience as a crazy student fan and as a local fan, students are much more likely to attend games with the intent of affecting the game by being loud and obnoxious, so it doesn’t make sense to give them random shitty seats.
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Some may not know this, but from the opening of the Joel until about 2003, the students sat on the sideline, right behind the Wake bench. Prosser moved them to behind the basket, so they could affect second half free throw shooting by the opposing team and they could sit by the opposing team's bench and heckle them. It was a good move.
 
myDeaconmyhand said:
I’m of the mindset that a more impressive, more intimidating home court advantage would pay for itself by creating an exciting environment vs reserving all the closest seats to the floor for donors.
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That's not really how finance works.
 
Rafi said:
Some may not know this, but from the opening of the Joel until about 2003, the students sat on the sideline, right behind the Wake bench. Prosser moved them to behind the basket, so they could affect second half free throw shooting by the opposing team and they could sit by the opposing team's bench and heckle them. It was a good move.
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I was going to point this out too. Students were moved from just near half court (where the player entrances used to be) behind the basket because the staff saw it as an advantage
 
That’s wild. Having the students behind the home bench seems like the absolute worst place to put them
 
myDeaconmyhand said:
That’s wild. Having the students behind the home bench seems like the absolute worst place to put them
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From a viewing perspective, they are the best seats in the building. And the entrance for the Wake players used to be there, so the players were greeted by a sea of students when entering or exiting the court.
 
Deacfreak07 said:
That's not really how finance works.
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A better game time environment would attract more donations, it doesn’t take much financial expertise to figure that out, I assume we just disagree on how much student seating location affects the environment. A much larger number of people are going to be consuming Wake basketball from television than in person, and the donors having good seats doesn’t improve the telecast whereas loud student sections absolutely makes the game more exciting on tv.
 
wakephan09 said:
I was going to point this out too. Students were moved from just near half court (where the player entrances used to be) behind the basket because the staff saw it as an advantage
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Did they actually see it as an advantage or did they just say that because they could make way more money selling those seats to people who actually pay for them?
 
BBDeac said:
Did they actually see it as an advantage or did they just say that because they could make way more money selling those seats to people who actually pay for them?
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Prosser wanted to make this move, and he was very vocal about it.
 
BBDeac said:
Did they actually see it as an advantage or did they just say that because they could make way more money selling those seats to people who actually pay for them?
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I'm sure opening up those seats to paying people didn't hurt, but I remember it the way rafi tells it
 
Having the students close to the opposing bench vs the home bench is an obvious improvement if the goal is to taunt the opposing bench, but in regards to a home court advantage, having more students on the sideline would be an improvement over them being toward the back of the bowl on an endzone
 
Prosser did all he could with the Joel and it was still a massive liability. The design doesn’t work. That’s the point.
 
If I remember correctly, moving students behind the backboard happened around the same time as the football student section got moved from behind the Wake sideline to the edge of the other side. Was Grobe adamant about that?
 
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Rafi said:
Prosser wanted to make this move, and he was very vocal about it.
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Granted this was nearly 20 years ago so my memory is a bit fuzzy, but my recollection of that was that Prosser was selling it after the fact rather than being vocal about needing to make the move for a competitive reasons prior to it occurring. I have no inside information so I don't really know but it always felt to me like it was more for financial reasons and Prosser was tasked with selling it.
 
Rafi said:
Prosser wanted to make this move, and he was very vocal about it.
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Yeah. Prosser wanted the students behind the backboard waving, yelling, hold and waving "brick" signs, swirlies etc. In a tight game, a few missed free throws by the opponent could make a difference.
 
BBDeac said:
Granted this was nearly 20 years ago so my memory is a bit fuzzy, but my recollection of that was that Prosser was selling it after the fact rather than being vocal about needing to make the move for a competitive reasons prior to it occurring. I have no inside information so I don't really know but it always felt to me like it was more for financial reasons and Prosser was tasked with selling it.
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Prosser wasn't someone who would blow smoke or lie for the admin. He was bigger than the admin and told it how it was.
 
It is funny - i actually agree with DR on a lot of his points. I do not like the Joel, I think it is too big and the design does not work well anymore. However, I simply feel that a better use of our money would be to modify the Joel to as good of a venue as we can. I believe that the most important aspects of a basketball atmosphere are 1) that it is loud and full; and 2) that the ticket is hard to get. That is what Duke has done and it simply works. The reason Duke has so much success is because the coach is excellent, the players are great, and Cameron rocks when they are good. I do not think there is anything special about Duke other than they have a good coach and Cameron is small, loud, packed, and a tough ticket. I grew up going to Memorial, which was a dump but damn was it loud. I went to all the games at Greensboro - it sucked and we do not want to do that again, trust me. I would like to see the Joel, in the best way possible, made smaller, move some of the students to better seats, and make the coliseum more “wake forest”. Now, whether Wake Forest will give up the revenue from 4-7 thousand UNC, Duke, or NCSU fans is the question. Carry on.
 
myDeaconmyhand said:
A better game time environment would attract more donations, it doesn’t take much financial expertise to figure that out, I assume we just disagree on how much student seating location affects the environment. A much larger number of people are going to be consuming Wake basketball from television than in person, and the donors having good seats doesn’t improve the telecast whereas loud student sections absolutely makes the game more exciting on tv.
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I don’t think this is true long term. It could be true in the short term, but not the life of the building. Passive revenue from those seats helped make sure we had the cash to buyout manning and hire Forbes after a decade of an empty arena. Student attendance is fairly fickle, at every school in the country, empty seats for donors still generate revenue when the team sucks.
 
I'd like the Joel to be smaller

Tony Bennett took over a program that was historically inferior to WF. He has won 78% of his games, 77% of his ACC games, won 5 regular season and 2 ACCT titles and a national title in the last 10 years, playing in a 14,500-seat arena that hosts Cirque de Soleil, Muse, Phish, and Metallica.
 
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