We say it every year but if the team is good and the weather is tolerable, students will come. That's pretty much the story at every school isn't it? Lacrosse is not football: Unless you're Loyola, which seems to draw a drunken student crowd no matter the weather, there needs to be a very specific set of conditions met in order for kids to show up to a lacrosse game. Hell, at some schools, students don't really go to lax games even when the teams are good and the weather is ideal (UNC and Duke come to mind).51percentcorn wrote: ↑Tue Nov 30, 2021 8:05 am Hopkins students and their attendance is an interesting question - especially if Hopkins performance and results improve this season. Sophomore students have very likely not seen a game and Juniors had a couple opportunities in February and March of 2020 and given the 2,000 reported attendance at both the UNC and Syracuse games that year - most did not avail themselves of the opportunity. Does that contribute to the decline in interest or does absence make the heart grow fonder? Weather/technology/etc. will likely continue to produce their adverse effects.
Hopkins for its part is making an effort to increase student engagement in all athletics—they started an Instagram page for the student section called "The Flock" this fall and it seems to be doing well, already has more than 1,000 followers.
In 2019, the last full season with no attendance restrictions, Hopkins finished third in the country in average home attendance behind only Syracuse and Maryland. And that was for a team that frankly was not very good until the two wins over Maryland at the end of the year (neither of which occurred at Homewood). It'd be nice to get more students to games for sure but I can think of several other big programs that should be much more concerned about attendance than we. Here was the top 20 in avg. attendance that year: https://i.imgur.com/aeTQtWc.png
