Mars Johnson|Marlin Chronicle
School spirit at athletic events has not been an overwhelming issue recently. But it can be tough to coordinate student sections for games considering all students enrolled at VWU have their own priorities and some are not going to be interested in sports.
VWU enrolls around 1,600 students yearly including graduate, undergraduate and online programs, according to the VWU website. Of those students 446 participate in sports of their own, just over a quarter of the population at VWU.
These factors can make it difficult to have rowdy student sections at athletic events but there is progress that can be made. One idea that could help is establishing a student-run Instagram account that allows students to vote on themes for student sections at the games.
“I would definitely attend more sports events if it had a theme and Instagram story advertising it. It just makes the game more known to students, and I personally think the themes are really fun,” freshman Allie Wheatley said.
Wheatley believes that adding a theme to the games would draw more people out and could potentially include a competition.
“You could also do little prizes like best dressed gets a $10 gift card,” Wheatley said.
In the early stages of this process, it would be important to choose the right games to get started, such as a tough in-conference matchup on a Friday or Saturday as opposed to an early-to-midweek non-conference matchup.
This way student sections would be exposed to the best possible games to go to early on, which the student-run Instagram account could advertise.
This account could be run by multiple students and athletes who can get their teammates to show up to other athletic events. Executive Director of Intercollegiate Athletics Andrea Hoover-Erbig believes that the idea has some potential.
“I would be interested to see if that could work. We already put our gameday graphics out on our Marlin athletics pages, but it’s more kind of marketing the team and the game time and not as much the spectator involvement,” Hoover said.
Hoover discussed past ideas such as tailgates and competitions at events but believes that word-of-mouth might be the most important.
“I also think people need to just personally invite people and just make them aware of it to get them out there,” Hoover said.
Director of Student Engagement Jennifer Cohen has worked on bringing more people out to the games, starting with basketball, creating the Marlin Madness tournament last year to kick off the season.
“We identified several games for basketball this past season to do themed games and we were working on a student section,” Cohen said.
Basketball did have a couple of games with a good student turnout this season, and it helps with how good they have been in the last couple of seasons.
Cohen expressed optimism about the possibility of pairing teams together that are not in the same season to support each other, such as baseball supporting basketball and the other way around.
“I think there’s chances there, but I think anything that is student-led is going to encourage other students to participate,” Cohen said.
Without the motivation of students these ideas will not work, but there is definitely progress that can be made in increasing school spirit at athletic events.
If you have any ideas, feel free to send me an email at clcamiscioli@vwu.edu.
By Coy Camiscioli
