Pilots vs Michigan St. Nov. 27th, 2:30p Chiles Center (ESPN)

Frustrating, but I appreciate that JD was up front with us right away. It’s an unfortunate part of the business. All credit to a great and classy Michigan State program.

Just left Shantay’s office --- team has moved on and now preparing for three home games in the next eight days. Now we need all @portlandpilots faithful to jump on board and support us as we continue to move this program forward. Look forward to seeing you in Chiles!

https://twitter.com/sleykam/status/1597309916884381696
https://twitter.com/sleykam/status/1597310040855433216

Robertson noted that during warmups, it almost felt like a Michigan State home game with so many Spartans fans around. But he loved the energy Pilots fans brought — especially during Portland's 8-0 burst in the final minute that gave the Pilots a shot at victory.

"Fun environment to play in front of," Robertson said. "We'd love that every single home game that we play. And it just makes it more fun for us players to play. You can get into it with the crowd. They give you a little boost of energy."

Izzo was almost pleading with fans to support this Pilots team.

"I feel sorry for the coach because you can't win games by yourself," Izzo said. "That place needed to be packed for this kind of game."

https://pamplinmedia.com/pt/12-sports/564663-452382-portland-mens-basketball-pushes-blue-bloods
https://archive.ph/3JowJ

Saw Leg’s tweet —- I agree but still want to hear his post game interview.
Can someone please posit it!

He didn't talk to the radio broadcast as they were situated in the upper level, and the next game was starting quickly.

He was on 1080 the Fan today about 1:30pm. I caught the end of it, but they should post it on their web site soon.

up7587 wrote:He didn't talk to the radio broadcast as they were situated in the upper level, and the next game was starting quickly.

He was on 1080 the Fan today about 1:30pm.  I caught the end of it, but they should post it on their web site soon.

https://www.audacy.com/1080thefan/podcasts/dusty-and-friends-20357/shantay-legans-11-28-22-1540002573

Izzo was almost pleading with fans to support this Pilots team.

"I feel sorry for the coach because you can't win games by yourself," Izzo said. "That place needed to be packed for this kind of game."

UP admin stills seems stuck believing that there is some mass group of “Pilot faithful” out there that can just be cajoled into attending games.

In the decade+ that I have regularly attended and watched UP basketball, I have never once witnessed a game, in person nor on TV, with more than 3,000-3,500 Pilots fans in attendance. Any attendance figure above that mark ONLY happens because opposition fans fill the arena.

If UP wants more fans, it needs to get serious about marketing its product with pizzazz and creativity. No secret Pilot Faithful is out there reading Leykam’s passive aggressive guilt trip tweets. The challenge at hand is not to activate a lazy fan base. It is to create a fan base where none exists. If you can’t correctly diagnose the problem, you cannot solve it.

100%. There's less than 20,000 alumni within 50 miles of campus and probably closer to 10,000 within casual driving distance. Filling the arena with alumni requires getting 50% of them to come out. 25% if each of them brings a friend. 25% of people aren't hardcore enough sports fans to have season tickets. You're going to need a fan base outside of people with ties to the school to regularly fill the stands. It can clearly be done as women's soccer in it's prime was filling Merlo regularly and outselling men's basketball. Part of it's people like a winner... Part of it's marketing.

Totally agree as well. And what a great opportunity a game like the MSU game created for them - a bunch of people (basketball fans) from the area coming to see basketball in the Chiles Center. Basketball fans who are not also fans of a conference rival but basketball fans who are looking for live, local basketball to take in seeing as their favorite team plays halfway across the country. These Portland-dwelling Sparty fans (all who I interacted with were awesome, by the way) could easily become Pilots fans, as well. They should be part of this "solution" being discussed above. Let's hope that the right people realized that and acted on it over the weekend. I tried doing my part - recruiting the couple Sparty fans right next to me and telling them I'd see them at a game down the road and they seemed willing to check one out . Go Pilots

Legans is doing his part as well. The most interesting part of the radio hit on 1080 was Legans offering free tickets to a game over this homestand to anybody that hit up his UP email. I hope a few local sports fans take him up on the offer.

Having the next home game against Multnomah does help this particular cause, unfortunately. Hard to ‘strike while the iron is hot’ with this pitch:

Did you like what you saw against national powers on ESPN last week? Well come on out this Wednesday as we take on… Multnomah.

I have had the “marketing - butts in the seats - discussion with Dave Taylor and there is nothing more he would like to do.
Marketing begins with “being on the radar.” For us, the radar is the Oregonian and local tv and radio - with the exception of good old 910 am - it is monopolized by Oregon State and the University of Oregon - to a lesser extent Portland State.
I don’t who is on the UP lead but the success is not there - I am sure the effort is.
Question: What is our “marketing budget and plan.”
My slogan and message is: “we went to a party on the bluff and a basketball game broke out!”
This requires upgrading the non-basketball stuff that goes on.
Please for the umteenth time get a band member who will put on the purple and “go crazy.”
The dance team is great but get mascot Wally,involved.
Be more creative with the half time entertainment - youth basketball games and the parents will come to see the kids.
I took a friend and my son’s basketball team to a game and his son ended up playing at Gonzag - Legans idea to look locally.
Again, it’s marketing!!!!!
We have a great product but the UP powers that be - whatever the structure I don’t know - need to Fund and sell the program(s’ ....all sports and academics.
If we don’t do it, Legans will be gone. Izzo is right.
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Couldn’t agree more with the discussion about marketing.  In this state, sports are only and always about the Ducks and Beavers with UP and PSU as occasional footnotes.  We now have incredible basketball, both men and women, but we need a hook to draw people in - and that hook ought to be entertainment.  If you went to the tournament in Las Vegas last year, the non-game highlight over and over again was the LMU drum squad.  Three or four guys with drums and a choreographed routine.  They got a standing ovation a couple times. People recognized them on the concourse, told them how great they were, and some kids wanted autographs.   We have the best dance team in the WCC, but all of the dance teams do pretty much the same thing.   Change it up - uniforms and routines.   Fans ought to look forward to the timeouts and halftime as much as the game.  After all, the game is only 40 minutes, but it takes two hours or more to play.  Maybe turn the marketing over to the business school and give them a budget - and tell them to start by studying the Savanna Bananas (an amazing story of turning the dying sport of baseball into a game that attracts people from all over the country and has a waitlist of 10,000 to get seats in the 4000 seat stadium.

A lot of things were tough re: attendance at Sunday's game.

1) Season ticket holders needed to purchase tickets as an extra, which is an added barrier.
2) Tickets were really expensive. Single-game lower level tickets were more than $100. Bleacher seats were about $40. That's a tough price for someone who maybe wants to bring a family member or two.
3) Thanksgiving weekend.. lots of people travelling or had family visiting.
4) 2:30 in the afternoon on a Sunday is an awkward time. Plus we didn't even know when we'd be playing until after the Villanova game, so that makes marketing in advance tough.
5) No designated student section, plus plenty of students hadn't even returned to campus yet.
6) Non-alumni basketball fans - who might otherwise have come to see UP play Michigan State - were at the Moda Center and Memorial Coliseum watching the other games featuring higher-profile teams.

I know, I know... excuses, excuses. But it's tough to go up against all of that. If it were a regular home game on a non-holiday weekend, that place would have been rocking a lot more. Even just all our season ticker holders and students would have made a big difference, and I'm sure a decent amount of casuals would have come too.

Bigger picture, I think something that could be successful is being very intentional about creating opportunities for alumni to see their friends at games. It's a laborious process, but I do think that if you identify the right type of "connector" people from the last 20 graduating classes or so, you could encourage them to reach out to their personal friend networks and "rally the troops," as it were. Definitely keep doing regular marketing too, but I think alumni would be a lot more likely to attend if invited by a friend and they knew they would see several people they know.

Maybe pick one game to start with (12/10 at New Orleans would be great, but it's probably too close... next best one would be LMU I guess, though 6PM on a Thursday is a tough time) - but then have several others already penciled in... I bet if people come to the first one, they would come to at least 1-2 additional ones. Maybe even more.

But again, this is a big time commitment, retail politics type of situation. It would require a lot of effort identifying the "connectors", reaching out to them, supporting them with ticket requests and all that, etc. But I don't think it's impossible if the alumni, development, and/or marketing offices could pitch in some assistance.

And personally, I think that is the recipe to building something long lasting. It might be bumpy getting it going, but there's no reason why every graduating class couldn't have a few games circled on the calendar the minute the schedules are released and start planning some mini-reunions before the season even starts. And once it becomes a tradition, maybe it could actually stick around despite the ups and downs of the team, who's coaching, etc.

Blah blah blah... it's so easy to solve all the problems from the outside, isn't it?

I don't blame anyone for low attendance Sunday. $30+ fees for GA and lay minute planning on a holiday is a tough sell when to the wider public you've just established an oh maybe we have something here a bit earlier than expected vibe Thursday/Friday. In hindsight handing out vouchers for a free home have ticket after the MSU game probably would have been a good marketing move even if we had to do it outside the arena due to it not being our event. The people in attendance are clearly willing to spend more than what the pilots charge for home games to watch their teams and might be willing to spend a lesser amount just to watch good d1 basketball even when it's not their team if we could get them in to experience a regular home game. I didn't think about it before hand, but it makes sense.

Looking forward we've now got a marketable product for the first time in a while. $5 ga seats for the remaining games pre WCC might get people a taste. It seems like we often have these types of marketing late in the season where people can attend 1 or 2 games and then forget about it by next season rather than establishing a pattern of attendance.

The last real marketing push arms to be when Porter was hired and it had some success, but unfortunately the results didn't follow and we couldn't keep that momentum. I think there was some fear of marketing Legans teams too early and I think that's not a bad thing. It'll be interesting to see if someone had a plan in place to implement if/when there was something to hype which there now is.

I saw a passive aggressive Facebook post about izzo saying if he were a fan he would have showed up and a caption to see you Wednesday. Seemed like a complete failure to read the room.... Trying to guilt people into seeing a NAIA squad? That's a bad look. I've already got a ticket and it made me think about whether I should just not show up in protest of a mid non conference outing against a non d1 school

dholcombe wrote:I saw a passive aggressive Facebook post about izzo saying if he were a fan he would have showed up and a caption to see you Wednesday. Seemed like a complete failure to read the room.... Trying to guilt people into seeing a NAIA squad? That's a bad look. I've already got a ticket and it made me think about whether I should just not show up in protest of a mid non conference outing against a non d1 school

Yeah, it's unfortunate timing that our next game is Multnomah. I wonder if pushing Saturday's North Dakota game would make more sense... their KenPom rating isn't great, but at least it's a D1 game and they have a winning record.

I understand why the non-D1 games happen, but they really are a bummer. And they are basically no-win too... anything closer than a total blowout has the appearance of being concerning, even though we all know that anybody can bomb threes for 40 minutes and keep things interesting. And while blowouts can be fun for a while, it does get a bit boring and garbage-timey.

But I also very much sympathize with the athletic department... you've got to try and capitalize on this momentum, no matter who is on your schedule or when the next game is. And I have personally been in touch with more than a few alumni who didn't go to any games last weekend but are definitely interested in seeing them soon. If there even a handful of people like that who show up on Wednesday due to some light cajoling on social media, it's worth it I'd say.

Trying to guilt fans into watching a game against an NAIA team is a great reminder that UP is still very much a Catholic institution.

NoPoNeighbor wrote:
The challenge at hand is not to activate a lazy fan base. It is to create a fan base where none exists. If you can’t correctly diagnose the problem, you cannot solve it.

dholcombe wrote:
Filling the arena with alumni requires getting 50% of them to come out. 25% if each of them brings a friend. 25% of people aren't hardcore enough sports fans to have season tickets. You're going to need a fan base outside of people with ties to the school to regularly fill the stands.

Bingo, bingo.

College basketball, like a lot of college athletics, really thrives on tradition, and let's face it: the predominant tradition of UP men's basketball over the last 60 years has been losing.  The last Pilots head coach to end his career with a winning overall record was Al Negratti--who retired in 1967.  Jack Avina presided over probably the best sustained run of success the program has ever had--while never making the NCAA Tournament and finishing with a .477 winning percentage over 17 years.  No UP men's basketball coach has ever been hired as a head coach elsewhere after leaving the Bluff.

The weight of all that is what UP is fighting against in trying to fill a 5,000 seat arena on the regular.  I became a fan of UP men's basketball as a kid, and my family had season tickets from the mid-90s through 2006.  But that was because of my family's history with the university, not because the Pilots were ever good (aside from 1994-96).  At least among my circle of friends at Catholic grade and high schools around Portland, very, very few people were masochistic enough to sit through the late Chavez and Holton years when there was a budding juggernaut in Spokane that (a) was a lot more fun to watch, and (b) lots of them had some connection to as well.  People love a consistent winner, and like dholcombe points out, we've seen that ourselves with women's soccer.

The rest of the city tuned Pilots men's basketball out a long time ago, and I can't really blame them.  Of course, those of us who survived the Porter era recognize what an incredibly special thing we have going on right now, but that's because we've been the only ones paying attention.  I genuinely believe that if the team keeps winning--especially marquee games like the one we have coming up against the Ducks--more attention will lead to more fans, which will lead to more attention, which will lead to more fans, and coupled with more marketing, we can start a virtuous cycle of sustained success.  But at least today, right now, there's no dormant Pilots fanbase that's just waiting to come to games.  We have to build it.

There must somewhere in the bowels of UP be a “marketing plan” Whether it is adequately funded or anticipated our good fortune, who knows? 

This is a Coach Logan’s issue - he brought EWU players and coaches with him recruited others and he surely discussed this before he was hired.
It’s not something he will  talk about publicly, but he’s a knowledgable man and when other D1 schools come calling it would be good to know we can keep him on the Bluff,

I havent seen student attendance mentioned yet. Obviously that was not expected at PKI but a lively packed student section makes the atmosphere more exciting for all involved. The last several games I have been at the student section is non-existent. And they are good and fun to watch now! When I was at UP we all drank heavily before the games to make it entertaining   ....would love to see some energy and support from the student body.