John Thompson III is worried.
Georgetown’s men’s basketball head coach has little more than a week before the Hoyas play their first game, and he has a lot on his mind. But right now he’s not thinking about line-ups, rotations, or rebounds. JTIII is worried about your afternoon classes.
“Because it’s the first [home] game, it’s at four o’clock at the afternoon on a Tuesday, I’m worried that America, because of the time, will see an empty Verizon Center,” Thompson said. “That is a worry, just because of the time. Hopefully people will get off of work and come right over from school, and it’s not an empty Verizon Center for the first game.”
Thompson is talking about Georgetown’s home opener against Temple, scheduled for the afternoon of November 17. The strange timing of the game is due to ESPN’s “College Basketball Tip-off Marathon,” a slate of games that extends for a consecutive 24 hours. The coach is happy to have the national exposure, but realizes it could cost the team one of its most important assets: the fans.
Ever since the Hoyas burst onto the national scene in the ‘80s with head coach John Thompson Jr. at the helm, Georgetown has been defined as a basketball school. Students’ enthusiasm has helped build up that reputation, such as when they stormed the streets of D.C. in 2007 after the Hoyas earned a spot in the Final Four.
It’s no secret that the fans can play a major role in college basketball. The energy, creativity, and solidarity of the student body give the collegiate crowd a unique power over the game. Crammed close to the court, monochromatically clad, jumping and chanting in unison—the players cannot ignore the fans.
“We absolutely notice the crowd,” Thompson said. “The energy that we feel and get from our fans is real. It’s tangible. It’s worth points. It helps us get stops. There’s no doubt about that.”
If the crowd can sway the score by even a few points, the fans may have made the difference last year for the Hoyas. Towards the end of the season Georgetown lost a couple—well, maybe more than a couple—heartbreakers, sometimes falling short of victory by only a few baskets.
Of course, Thompson doesn’t think the fans are the ones to blame for the ignominious end to last season.
“The fans have been great the whole time I’ve been here,” he said. “I think the support was terrific throughout the year, through the good times and bad. But we have a late arriving crowd. We walk out of the locker room to start the game and the place is half full. Every game, even if it’s UConn or Villanova, you walk out there, the place is half full. And then I don’t notice the crowd, and then I come out for the second half and people showed up.”
As the losses started to pile up last season, the students began to trickle into the Verizon Center more slowly, and the hoops enthusiasm that had enthralled campus during the tournament runs of the past few years quietly began to ebb.
Georgetown’s most dedicated Hoya fans, the men and women of Hoya Blue, know just how influential the crowd can be. And they understand the effect of losing on fan support, especially at Georgetown.
“We have challenges, being that [the Verizon Center is] off-campus, being that Georgetown students are very busy,” Hoya Blue Communications Office Kasper Statz said. “We have a reputation of being fair-weathered. We always have to fight that perception. We have to make sure that people know we support teams through the good times and the bad.”
Two Tuesdays from now, ESPN viewers nationwide will learn just what kind of fans Georgetown students are. They better be out in full force, or once again JTIII could have bigger concerns than empty seats.
Why is there no mention of the fact that Verizon Center caters to all fans, not just Georgetown ones. So when West Virginia or Pittsburgh comes to town, no matter how many fans are in the poorly placed student section, the surrounding seats will always be filled with opposing fans who out-cheer us no matter what? I think that’s the bigger problem than having nobody sit in those terrible seats behind the basket.
Hoya Blue carries a lot of responsibility. We’ve nurtured a culture of being nerdy and respectful at games. Look at Duke- they’re even nerdier, but they’re wildly offensive and hilarious. As disgusting as it sounds, a game at Cameron Indoor is the most amazing sports experience in America.
Of course the Verizon Center will never be Cameron. But we need more coordinated fan support (the Hoya Blue chants are absurdly lame and unoriginal), more hilarious behavior (too bad we never get any weekend night games…), and better support from the sides of the arena. the non student fans treat Big East games like theyre at a funeral. how about one game during the year where they open one side of the lower bowl to be the student section? it would be like cameron, WVU, pitt, etc. where the students are prominent and can really impact the rest of the crowd.