How do we get people to Wallace Wade on Saturday?

[Barnstormer]

I think we should add an exhibition game with NCCU to week -1. The first game of the year is always one to work out the kinks but no division 1 team should play Division 2 or whatever they call it during the season. An exhibition game with NCCU would attract local crowds and give the teams an opportunity to run plays without concern for the effects. Likewise in the spring I would like to see an exhibition game played with a lower division team in place of a glorified scrimmage within the team.

One of our non conference games should always be NC State. Local fans would support it.

Beer needs to be sold at the game to anyone over the age of 21.

Make the game more friendly to the fans at halftime .

[jimmymax]

Make the game more friendly to the fans at halftime .

That would mean once again allowing folks to leave and re-enter, which would hurt sales of the not-yet-sold beer.

I stopped buying season tickets due to the front-loading of noon home games in August and September. I have no interest in baking in the sun. I prefer crisp, fall, "football weather". I buy tickets for select games based on the opponent and the weather.

[hallcity]

The sun on the East side is definitely a serious problem but there’s a ready solution. Get a ticket on the West side under the overhang. It will cost a few bucks more but you won’t be in the sun. Tickets are always available.

[HereBeforeCoachK]

Alumni numbers locally, I will grant you.

Ballpark, Chapel Hill has 60k residents and Durham 260k.

Alumni or not, you need ten percent of the Durham population to take a vested interest in Duke football and you’d have a full venue.

You're missing a huge point. Those "Durham" residents are also residents of the state of NC...and Chapel Hill "residents" are merely a rounding error in the NC fan base, much of which has to do with nothing more than the state and the University sharing a name. It's the massive inherent value the "University ofs" have and that Duke will never and can never have. Durham v Chapel Hill residents is a fact with no relevance here. More Durham residents, not attached to either school, are Cheat fans.

[budwom]

I would hope that members of the athletic department, with more exact revenue/attendance/concession numbers are doing this kind of analysis regularly. While I don't doubt we might have more creative ideas at times, I'm skeptical that the department would get something as basic as the effect of ticket price on attendance and concessions wrong...but who knows?



This year is interesting with the schedule backloaded with home games...which will hopefully make for some great weather. We could see some good crowds for those last 3 games, and only the A&T game looks like a (hopefully...) snoozer. Ideally we won't lay offensive eggs in the others...regularly going significant portions of home games without scoring is so hard to get up for...half our home games <=14 points last year.

ready for it to get goin'.

I think you give the department WAY too much credit...my conversations with some of them just make me sad...
As stated before, if we WIN, more people come, we get better time slots from ESPN so even more people (who hate sun stroke) come, on and on. Gonna be a tough year this year for a variety of reasons, but I'm more hopeful about 2020...

[HereBeforeCoachK]

I think you give the department WAY too much credit...my conversations with some of them just make me sad...
As stated before, if we WIN, more people come, we get better time slots from ESPN so even more people (who hate sun stroke) come, on and on. Gonna be a tough year this year for a variety of reasons, but I'm more hopeful about 2020...

All of this is true...but looking to Cameron as an analogy, by big time program standards, Duke's home BB attendance is low. But it doesn't matter, because the building is historic, and tiny, so the home atmosphere is amazing. They should have contemplated those concepts when they had a pot full of money to renovate Wade. Clearly they didn't. There are FB stadia in this country where 20-30 thousand fans create a great atmosphere...and there were some things they could've done to Wade to re-create some of that. Instead, they were all into aesthetics and the gothic rock and the obscenely big press box and so on. Meanwhile, the atmosphere for the players is no better than it was before.

Sometimes I wonder if the Duke Athletic Department is K, Cut, Pollard, and a bunch of idiots.

[fuse]

You're missing a huge point. Those "Durham" residents are also residents of the state of NC...and Chapel Hill "residents" are merely a rounding error in the NC fan base, much of which has to do with nothing more than the state and the University sharing a name. It's the massive inherent value the "University ofs" have and that Duke will never and can never have. Durham v Chapel Hill residents is a fact with no relevance here. More Durham residents, not attached to either school, are Cheat fans.

Respectfully, I’m not missing any of the points you’ve articulated. Your points merely highlight the challenge.

We know there are not 25k local Duke alumni (?).
Even if there were, there would never be 100% attendance from alumni.

If an assumption is made that you get 5k local alumni and their family, and (depending on team/fan base) a few hundred opponent fans, where are you expecting other attendees to come from if not Durham (and maybe Wake, Orange, and Chatham)?

What solutions are you proposing to attract people to games?

[BLPOG]

You're missing a huge point. Those "Durham" residents are also residents of the state of NC...and Chapel Hill "residents" are merely a rounding error in the NC fan base, much of which has to do with nothing more than the state and the University sharing a name. It's the massive inherent value the "University ofs" have and that Duke will never and can never have. Durham v Chapel Hill residents is a fact with no relevance here. More Durham residents, not attached to either school, are Cheat fans.

Durham demographics are changing in the direction of "unaffiliated" rather than Cheat fans specifically. Picking up the unaffiliated fans is a heck of a lot easier than the Cheat fans.

Regardless, the way to do it is what I mentioned a couple days back. Attendance is declining practically everywhere, not because people have lost interest in sports, but because they have better options. The key is to make game day a better option, in part by incorporating things that people would be doing otherwise and thus lessening the opportunity cost.

Let people drink beer outside.

[CrazyNotCrazie]

I remember one time hearing a statistic that there are more UNC alumni in the state of NC than there are Duke alumni in the world. That explains our problem - unless we tap into the local fan base and make the games interesting, we are not going to draw. And it would also be helpful to make it compelling enough that alums within driving distance (Atlanta-DC) want to come in for a game or two. I know lots of alums come down from the DC area for basketball so we need to make them want to do so for football. For a 3:30 game, you can drive down that morning, go to the game, hit a favorite bar/restaurant, go to a hotel and drive back the next day.

I know there are a lot of beer fans on DBR but I think adding beer to the stadium is really low on the list. You think the concession lines are slow now? Imagine how they will be when they are checking IDs, pouring beer, etc.? And you will have to pay for more police officers. I am not a big drinker but I don't know many people for whom drinking is a deciding factor as to whether they go to a game. And not having beer likely makes the game more attractive to some groups of people, so there is a tradeoff.

As the parent of elementary school aged kids (which I think is the target audience), my main concerns are ticket prices, ease of access (I don't want to be parking miles away), and a fun product on the field. I live in NYC and periodically take my kids to Columbia football games. It is a short subway ride from my home (no parking issues), tickets are cheap, and they sometimes have bouncy castles or meet the mascot events. Granted, one of the other attractions to me is that the stadium is usually half empty so my kids can easily roam around if they want to (that is not what Duke is aiming for). I think that the idea of parking far away than finding their way through the Duke campus is enough to scare a lot of people off - the average Durham resident not affiliated with the University does not want to be wandering around the campus or through random parking lots.

[chris13]

I hesitate to reply to this thread, lest i say too much. My problem is my son is special needs, uses a walker, and distances over 20 or 30 yards are very difficult for him. The handicapped parking (formerly free) places used to be in the Iron Dukes parking lot, at the bottom of the hill where you go up to cameron and WW. They had golf-cart thingies that would take you from that parking lot up to the loop. Sam had, at best, a 15yard walk to the gates...now, everything is different.

we had to park in the whitford (paid) and come all the way around the entire stadium to ride the elevator down to the field level (scoreboard end) cross the field at the end zone to access the handicap seating, because there's no ramp access to those seats on that side. probably 300 yards total... sheesh...


#2. the sun is blistering on that side. sorry to sound like a whimp, but that's one of the things that keep us from going...the kids hate it..

#3 spotty cell service and slow wifi...



i told y'all i shouldn't have replied.

I don't think you said too much. You identified how Duke made it significantly harder for you and other fans with special needs members of their group to attend games. In the age of HDTV and the Internet I think all stadiums need to think about how to make the game day experience as pleasant and friction free as possible.

[Indoor66]

Years ago I heard a stat that every three years, UnCheat graduated more students (?) than Duke did in its history. I questioned that then and do today, but there is validity to the concept of the relative numbers. Another thing is that in the '30s, '40s, '50s, '60s, and into the '70s, locals in Durham tended to be loyal to Duke. This changed starting in the late '60s and forward as the demographic changed. A lot of this developed with the decline of textiles and tobacco and the rise of the Research Triangle Park. Another factor for change was the building of the Durham Freeway and then I-40 that accelerated the changes.

[HereBeforeCoachK]

Durham demographics are changing in the direction of "unaffiliated" rather than Cheat fans specifically. Picking up the unaffiliated fans is a heck of a lot easier than the Cheat fans.

Regardless, the way to do it is what I mentioned a couple days back. Attendance is declining practically everywhere, not because people have lost interest in sports, but because they have better options. The key is to make game day a better option, in part by incorporating things that people would be doing otherwise and thus lessening the opportunity cost.

Let people drink beer outside.

Demographics may be changing in Durham, but the amount of NC fans still far outnumber the amount of Duke fans, not only in Durham, but within a 75 mile radius (approx drawing area). So the demographics are the answer as to the situation today and for the last 30 years or more.

Duke's problem is not dwindling attendance really, it's never been good in my life. It's that there a few flaws in Wade that have kept attendance down even with Cut's major uplift of the program.

And I'm all for the beer...

[budwom]

All of this is true...but looking to Cameron as an analogy, by big time program standards, Duke's home BB attendance is low. But it doesn't matter, because the building is historic, and tiny, so the home atmosphere is amazing. They should have contemplated those concepts when they had a pot full of money to renovate Wade. Clearly they didn't. There are FB stadia in this country where 20-30 thousand fans create a great atmosphere...and there were some things they could've done to Wade to re-create some of that. Instead, they were all into aesthetics and the gothic rock and the obscenely big press box and so on. Meanwhile, the atmosphere for the players is no better than it was before.

Sometimes I wonder if the Duke Athletic Department is K, Cut, Pollard, and a bunch of idiots.

I agree about the poor atmosphere, but have to say that the major problem at WW is the quality of the team playing in it. You can't fix that with atmosphere...again (to repeat myself) when Duke plays well, we get fans, e.g. the excellent atmosphere at the Va Tech game last year...then came the turd egg...it is very difficult to manufacture excitement when you team is getting humbled...

[CameronBornAndBred]

Sometimes I wonder if the Duke Athletic Department is ...

I can't count the number of times that I have said it astounds me with the overall intelligence on Duke campus that there is such an obscene lack of common sense.

[OldPhiKap]

I agree about the poor atmosphere, but have to say that the major problem at WW is the quality of the team playing in it. You can't fix that with atmosphere...again (to repeat myself) when Duke plays well, we get fans, e.g. the excellent atmosphere at the Va Tech game last year...then came the turd egg...it is very difficult to manufacture excitement when you team is getting humbled...

Yup. The experience doesn't matter very much if the content is not worth watching.

I've seen games in Athens, Tuscaloosa, Clemson, Columbia and Tallahassee. There is nothing great about any of their stadiums (some are downright dingy). But they're full almost every game because there is a game worth watching and a team worth supporting by non-alums.

And none of that is throwing shade at Cut, who has done an incredible job resurrecting the program and building something of which I am very proud. But you gotta get the big teams in there, and you gotta beat them, if you want folks to get off the couch and deal with the inconveniences of actually going to a game.

[budwom]

Yup. The experience doesn't matter very much if the content is not worth watching.

I've seen games in Athens, Tuscaloosa, Clemson, Columbia and Tallahassee. There is nothing great about any of their stadiums (some are downright dingy). But they're full almost every game because there is a game worth watching and a team worth supporting by non-alums.

And none of that is throwing shade at Cut, who has done an incredible job resurrecting the program and building something of which I am very proud. But you gotta get the big teams in there, and you gotta beat them, if you want folks to get off the couch and deal with the inconveniences of actually going to a game.

Yes, indeed, the inconvenience factor is yoooge in this day and age when you can quite easily sit at home and watch your mediocre team on HD TV without dealing with parking, security lines, and hapless play.
Even a number of large, successful schools are seeing a drop off in attendance due to these factors...

But when a team is playing well and there's excitement in the stadium, it really is a bunch of fun...

[killerleft]

Well, as long as we're I'm a real wanker for saying this.I'm a real wanker for saying this.I'm a real wanker for saying this.I'm a real wanker for saying this.I'm a real wanker for saying this.ing, allow me.

If I buy two general admission season tickets that cost $70 apiece, they should cost me $140 and maybe up to $10 to ship them to me. So don't charge me $70 apiece and then $30 apiece as a shipping & handling fee. The two tix are in the same envelope, for Pete's sake. Have the guts to put it out front that these tickets really cost about $95 apiece.

The ticket cost is still low, and I appreciate that. But, why make me feel like I'm buying from some sleazy Friendly Freddie, who's winking as he makes me a great deal?

[budwom]

Well, as long as we're I'm a real wanker for saying this.I'm a real wanker for saying this.I'm a real wanker for saying this.I'm a real wanker for saying this.I'm a real wanker for saying this.ing, allow me.

If I buy two general admission season tickets that cost $70 apiece, they should cost me $140 and maybe up to $10 to ship them to me. So don't charge me $70 apiece and then $30 apiece as a shipping & handling fee. The two tix are in the same envelope, for Pete's sake. Have the guts to put it out front that these tickets really cost about $95 apiece.

The ticket cost is still low, and I appreciate that. But, why make me feel like I'm buying from some sleazy Friendly Freddie, who's winking as he makes me a great deal?

Is it possible that Ron Popeil is working in the ticket office? The old Shipping and Handling scam, eh?

[TruBlu]

Others have mentioned it before, and perhaps it is being done already to some extent, but:

1) free admission to First Responders and their families. We owe them.

2) free admission to military personnel, and arrange busses, at no charge) to transport them from local bases. We owe them.

3) cater to schools, civic clubs, etc.

This would be a long term way to build up a fan base . . . As long as the team is competitive, and it is an enjoyable* and pleasant* game day experience.

*see other posts (above) for details.

[killerleft]

Is it possible that Ron Popeil is working in the ticket office? The old Shipping and Handling scam, eh?

They still make and sell the Popeil Pocket Fisherman! What a guy. $99 now.