The admin and AD need to realize they need to create fans from within.... your students. Throw the kitchen sink at them early from acceptance letter to graduation and stress being a loyal and sporting fan.... especially for our Bball teams. They need to brand us a basketball school. Keep reminding our students and alumni and community that we are basketball focused and went to Final Four... even if it was 20 years ago. WE are the original Cinderella. Our marketing team should be all over this and promote it everywhere and every year. Hell... all over Richmond and on I-95 in Richmond you see vcu billboards promoting their bball team. When people see vcu in Richmond they think Basketball.
For 30 years we have the same conversations about going after people around NOVA and the casual fans.... it's not gonna happen in getting 1000 new season ticket holders coming.... that's a pipe dream in this area. You have to remember NOVA is a very large transient area. A large percentage of people that live around the Fairfax campus never went to Mason, thus would probably not care too much for our sporting events. They moved here for a job or for family reasons with really no ties to the school besides living close to it and driving around it for the people residing in Fairfax, Burke, etc. There are also a lot of JMU, VT, UVA, Radford, Longwood, etc. alumni around Fairfax.... they aren't going to come to a GMU game unless we are playing their school or they get free tickets from a friend/co-worker and/or ask them to go with them to a game.
Over the past 30 years, I don't think these NOVA residents/casual fans would be interested in a Hofstra or Davidson match outside our core alumni and die hards or big bball fans in general. Hence the continuous 2500-3000 attendance draws for these games usually.
Branding us NOVA's team is cute and all but will it really move the needle with these types of people? I'm going to say no. In this area we have to schedule big time opponents to draw a large crowd - UVA, VT, UMD, Gtown Tennessee, Penn State, WV, etc. These types of games will get us 5k and upwards for attendance. Other than that.... get use to season norm of 2500-4000 a game.... it's just our reality in this world right now.
Would rather take any major marketing campaign money and just invest back into our NIL. Until we reach the NCAA tourney and get more eyes on us and be more relevant again to sports fans and people around NOVA.... we will continue to be stagnant with our yearly attendance rate.
