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| You got beef? Fitting for the New Jersey Classic |
It's like when Harry Callahan says to Lieutenant Briggs at the end of Magnum Force, "A man's got to know his limitations". The same could be said for lacrosse. Know the limits of your product and realize the extent of your fan base. Does the NCAA expect to fill the Meadowlands or M&T Bank Stadium for any of these non-championship events? Lets just stick with the numbers for a the moment. Last year's Minolta Classic sold 25,742 tickets. I'll admit that's amazing for three college lacrosse games, but that stadium holds 82,000 people. Based on the calculator that Microsoft so graciously included on my machine, that means that 70% of the stadium was empty. On ESPN, where most of us will see these games, the attendance looks even lower due to the enormity of these venues and the massive blocks of empty colored seats. It literally looks like a few thousand people turned out for these games. I think that makes us (the lax community) look like small frogs in a big pond.
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| The 2010 crowd was deemed a success. |
There is also something special about being on a college campus to watch an athletic event that you don't get at a neutral professional site. You might not get this, especially if you actually went to college. This is probably because I never made it past JUCO and I like to fantasize that I am a student as I walk from my dented Corolla to the stadium box office to beg for the student discount since I have mysteriously lost my college ID.
Look, I'm all for the expansion of the sport of lacrosse but what I'm not in favor of is rushing it's growth or trying to shove it down peoples' throats. The growth of lacrosse will happen naturally, I assure you. It has to, its just too good of a product. There may come a time when stadiums of this size are necessary to provide seating for 80,00 paying lacrosse fans but I don't think we are quite there yet. I say let's leave the NFL stadiums for who they were intended for, the NFL, Gwar and monster truck shows.
Okay, so I must admit that this is more of a rant then a blog, so go ahead and let me know what all 476 of you think. Oh wait, that's my reader count from my other blog about wedding cakes. But seriously, I am interested in your opinion on this. Does this help the sport of lacrosse grow or does it simply give all of us a feeling of legitimacy because we get to play our little sport where the big boys play?
Woody, first off, lots of Senior Citizens are going back to school to finish their degrees these days. Then you won't have to beg, and once you are a student, maybe you can play on the club team?
ReplyDeleteI gotta agree with you that it is somewhat painful to see all these places sparsely populated for the "big events" that IL puts together. At first, they seemed great...big time venue, lots of hype early in the season, get the teams that everybody expected to see in the Final Four used to playing in NFL stadiums, etc. But now, these things are a dime a dozen. The novelty of them has worn off. Sure, maybe if they focused on just one, they could get away with it. Maybe that would bring out a decent crowd. Spread out the regions they pull the teams from. Mix in a DIII game too. Certainly push back the date and let it warm up a bit. But once a season is enough.
And I too think that there is something meaningful about watching games on campus. I'm glad the Hopkins-Twerps tilt is back on campus. Sure they are a storied rivalry that you would think fits the bill for "Day of Rivals" but it didn't seem that way to me when they played the games at Empty Bank. Not as many of the students showed up when the games were off campus and that, for better or worse, was part of the entertainment! I mean, you can't really expect the JHU Cheerleaders to want to make that couple mile walk down Howard Street, right? Ya gotta stay on campus to catch that act.
Wood your ID is still in Catonsville's equipment room waiting for you to return your chest protector.
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