I agree that Monsanto would have been a really great piece to have, as he could eat some of Zay and Walton's minutes, which have not been productive. The game was indeed fun to watch but the atmosphere in the Joel was painful. Not only was it empty, many fans were annoyed with any fellow fans that showed excitement or passion. My friends and I sat in one of the many rows of empty seats about 10 rows up from mid court on the side opposite the benches. I stood up and was shouting after Jake's dunk in the first half, and the two people behind me probably in their late 20s or early 30s were talking to each other about how weird we were for being excited. When Miles Lester hit his 3 we all went crazy as he's a popular kid on campus, and the same fans said "you guys must not get out of the house much, huh". If you look at twitter and my friend is telling me it's on the 247 boards as well, there were several other fans who had similar experiences in the Joel tonight of being told to quiet down or calm down. Pretty disappointing but I guess all we can do is hope it improves and do our best to get our butt over to the Joel when we can. To this end, football is a top 10 team and has managed only one actual sellout of what is literally the singular smallest stadium in power conference football, and it took 30%+ being opposing fans to get there. I get that we are a small school with an alumni base that is not local, etc. etc. and I defend our fanbase to other teams by citing that. However, at some point we just need to find a way to be better. If the most we can muster up for a football game in prime time as a top 15 team is probably about 24,000 Wake fans, I don't know how we expect to fill the 14,000 seat Joel for 20 home games a year mostly on week nights.
My proposals to fix this:
1. Continue to win games - yes
2. Aggressively market the program within the WF community. In years past I have seen many professors (famously Kenny Hirbst) at games, and I have not seen that this year. The disruption of the pandemic probably took away the routine of going to games for many in the community that had for years even under DM. - yes
3. Upgrade the seats of fans in the upper deck into the lower sections where many seats owned by season ticket holders go unused. There should be an app that allows season ticket holders to give up their seat for such games that they will not be attending. Having a few hundred fans up there all spread out does nothing for the atmosphere but having them in the lower bowl would help. - sounds like a good idea
4. As an admissions department, give the benefit of the doubt to local students if resumes are comparable to students like myself from other regions of the country. - I don't think admissions would ever base their decisions on who will go to a basketball game.
5. Increase enrollment by continuing to build the engineering programs. This is already in the works and I believe the target is to get to an underhand enrollment of 8,000 students. - god I hope not, Wake was the place for me because it was small and offered low student to teacher ratio. It's too big over 5,000 now!
6. Market the team to the Winston community, specifically in local schools and churches. - Sure
Anybody with other ideas please chime in, because as much as this is a problem it is also an opportunity to grow for the future.