by Jacob Slinkman & Ethan Lecker
UW-Green Bay athletics has 14 athletic programs, yet many do not receive as much support from the student body as their men’s and women’s basketball teams.
The 14 sports at UW-Green Bay include six men’s and eight women’s sports. The six men’s sports are basketball, soccer, Nordic ski, cross country, swimming & diving, and golf. The women’s sports are basketball, soccer, Nordic ski, cross country, swimming & diving, golf, volleyball, and softball.
Basketball games generally have the highest attendance, with the two home games from the weekend of December 4-7; the men and women each hosted a home game that ranged from 1,500 to 1,600 in attendance. Volleyball is typically in the 500-600 range, as both of the final two games were 572 and 629. Soccer is often in the high 100s to mid-200s. The last two men’s soccer games were 194 and 242 for attendance. For the women’s soccer team, the last two games had attendance numbers of 187 and 230. Attendance for cross country, Nordic ski, swimming & diving, and golf is not tracked by UWGB’s athletic department.
The Mark Murphy Endowed Director of Green Bay Athletics, Josh Moon, said, “Attendance is very important to our overall financial health – we rely on season and game day ticket sales to help fund our department.” Moon also said, “More emphasis is put on men’s and women’s basketball because they are two of the highest profile sports, they are both ticketed at a high level, and there is significant donor and community interest. We try to provide basic levels of promotion for all of our other sports, but more emphasis is put on the ticketed sports to ensure we can generate revenue to support all of the programs.”
With UWGB having similar attendance for men’s and women’s basketball and having solid attendance for volleyball, Moon also said “no” to there being a difference between support on campus between men’s and women’s sports for Green Bay athletics.
Moon added, “It’s definitely easier to promote and understand the sports that are the most popular in the US, like basketball. Especially sports where a significant amount of our student population may have participated in or attended games while in high school. The more familiar students are with the sport, the more likely they are to attend games.”
One question proposed in a survey of 63 UWGB students was “How actively do you follow UWGB’s Athletics Program?”
Nearly 76 % of the 62 surveyed responses to this question (47 of 62) indicated that they follow UW-Green Bay athletics either moderately, somewhat, or not at all. The results show there may be a lack of interest in our athletics programs, despite UWGB being one of three NCAA Division I schools in Wisconsin. It’s possible that students don’t know that UWGB is a Division I school, raising questions about how athletics are marketed on campus.
Moon said even basketball can sometimes go unnoticed. “I think a lot of our teams fly under the radar at UWGB, even basketball does. This is one of our biggest challenges: how can we better engage our student population to get them excited about supporting their fellow students at games and getting them to come out, have some fun, win some prizes, and release some stress from their daily grind as a student.”
Limited student engagement may contribute to lower attendance and reduced fan involvement. The survey results suggest that additional strategies may be needed to strengthen the connection between the athletics program and the student body in the overall interest of UWGB’s campus.
UWGB is known as a “suitcase school,” meaning many students are close enough to home to leave campus for short periods of time whenever they like. This dynamic can weaken weekend game-day atmospheres, particularly for sports outside of basketball and volleyball, which benefit from playing at the Kress Events Center.
Of the students who do follow the UWGB athletic department, there are large discrepancies in which sports they are actively following.
Out of the six men’s sports at UWGB, the Basketball team held 53.1% of the support from the students taking the survey. Soccer, swimming, diving, and cross country each received 10% of responses or more, and only three students showed support for the golf team and the Nordic ski team.
When the same question was posed for UWGB’s women’s sports, the results were nearly the same, with the addition of strong support for the volleyball team, which does not exist on the men’s side. Despite that shift, basketball remained the most supported sport overall based on the survey results. With softball and volleyball added, the basketball team drew 38.5% of the vote, followed by the volleyball team with 25.7%. All other women’s sports had less than 10% of the votes each.
One issue facing the lesser-followed UWGB athletic teams is visibility. A survey of the student population on this topic found that 65 % of students surveyed felt completely uninformed or mostly uninformed about the schedules and achievements of UWGB’s non-major sports teams.
Another issue affecting attendance is the connection between the athletes themselves and the student body, with one student saying, “The athletes at this school are rude to most non-student athletes, so why should we support them?” Another student commented that they “feel no connection to anyone on any of the teams,” and that they “never see any of the athletes walking around campus,” saying it “seems like they just disappear” when they don’t have a game or event.
Moon stated that a closer connection between athletes and the student body could be the key for some of the lesser-known programs to grow their following among the student body, citing one of UWGB’s teams as an example.
“Swimming and diving has done an excellent job with getting involved in other areas on campus, especially student government,” Moon said. “They get non-athletes to show up to their meets because of how active swimming and diving students are in many different organizations on campus. They simply worked on building relationships with other students, and then those students returned the favor by showing up.”
Another issue facing UWGB could be its conference alignment, as some students believe that the Horizon League does not offer the highest level of competition, making sporting events less exciting to attend. One student stated, “The teams, especially the basketball teams, don’t play any real schools except for maybe Madison once a year.” Another student said, “Not that I think we’d do well at all in a bigger conference, but Horizon League schools just aren’t fun to watch for the most part.”
The issue does not just present itself in attendance, either. Each UWGB team, except for the women’s golf team, has its own social media account. The cross-country teams, the Nordic ski teams, and the swimming and diving teams share an account between their men’s and women’s teams, and the trends among the student body are very similar to each team’s social media following, which has one very large outlier.
For both the men’s and women’s sports at UWGB, the basketball teams would have the largest Instagram following, if it weren’t for the women’s volleyball team standing out with 28.8 thousand followers, which is 20,000 more than any other UWGB team’s account. For men’s sports, the basketball team stands out with more than 7,500 followers, followed by the soccer team with over 3,000. The joint account for the swim and dive team is next, with just under 3,000, and then the joint Nordic ski team account with over 1,000. The joint cross-country account, followed by the golf team’s account, brings up the rear with under 900 followers each.
Following the volleyball team’s staggering follower count, the women’s basketball team has surpassed its male counterpart with 8,700 followers, followed by the swim and dive team. The softball team is next, standing at just over 2,700 followers, followed by the Nordic ski team, the cross country team, and finally the women’s soccer team, which also has fewer than 900 followers.
Whether the issue is social media promotion, the athletic department’s promotion, or student-athletes’ connection on campus, the issue of lower support for certain UWGB teams is important to the student body. Of the 63 UWGB students who participated in the survey, 81% said equal promotion and support for all sports is moderately to extremely important, suggesting that while engagement varies, students want all UWGB teams to succeed.