Game Attendance

Here are the Pilots' average home game attendance for each of the last 10 years. As the numbers show, there was a big jump from 2003 to 2005, with the attendance slightly growing but holding pretty steady since then. What are peoples' theories as to why the 2003 to 2005 jump?

2001: 1440
2002: 1685 (National Champs)
2003: 1440
2004: 2101
2005: 3403 (National Champs)
2006: 3408
2007: 3771
2008: 3622
2009: 3472
2010: 3549

Lights at Merlo in 2004 is a big one. It seems that the night games allowed more fans who are ordinarily involved in their own or their kids playing could attend the games. Before that, Sunday had higher attendance.

Then the Spring game where we beat Mexico as a presage for the season to come in 2005 was another. Anybody who saw than game had to be excited about the fall season. 2005 was also a big year because we had more home games in the playoffs than we had before. Those sellouts really boosted the season totals. ( about 1/5 of total attendance for two games)

If you look at years since, we have had steady increases without those tournament Sellouts at home late in the tourney. If you look at attendance during the season, it has increased every year.

And the administration made a bigger promotion push in those years than they had before. UP made a commitment that Womens soccerand Mens basketball would be the Marquis sports when Larry Williams became AD.

Could you give me a link as to where these numbers are? They aren't at NCAA.org.

On portlandpilots.com, go the statistics link in the women's soccer section. There are archived stats going back to 2001*. Choose a year, then choose the cumulative season statistics and you will find attendance numbers in the overall team statistics section of the report.

*Coulda sworn there was Pilot soccer before 2001...

Question: Is there a possibility that FC Portland has a unique club impact on attendance. In other words, there is a very good club program in the area, with a lot of Pilot alums as coaches. Are those alums successfully marketing Pilots games to their players?