I read
Denny O’Brien’s
column on the need for support by East Carolina fans to fill Dowdy-Ficklen
Stadium on every occasion if they want the Pirates to be able to move up
to a Bowl Championship Series conference.
It brought to mind what I
had been told time and again by fans over the years while I wrote for
Greenville’s The Daily Reflector.
There were a number of times
that I chastised the Pirate fans for their lack of loyalty to the
program.
Oh, sure, there were those who attended every game, rain or
shine, no matter who the opponent. But they were generally in
the minority.
Since the 1960's, I’ve watched
attendance. For the most part, you could just about guarantee close to a
sellout for the opening home game of the season, especially if it was
the first game of the year.
But after that, the
attendance numbers would begin to slip, students and non-students alike. It
spiked back up for Homecoming, but after that it went down again.
And it didn’t seem to matter
who was on the slate. We could be playing Richmond or Miami and the
result would still be the same.
During the 1970's, when Sonny
Randle’s and Pat Dye’s teams were whipping tail from one end of the
schedule to the other, the cycle was repeated year after year.
I began asking why this
was so.
The answer I got from
fans during the lean years was that the Pirates were not
winning. They didn’t want to spend their hard-earned money seeing a team
that was losing more than it was winning.
There were the up years,
too, when the Pirates knocked off just about everyone they played,
more or less dominating the Southern Conference before they left the
league for what they hoped would be greener pastures.
The excuse then became, “We
don’t want to come out and see East Carolina play (fill in the blank
with Appalachian State, Richmond or William and Mary). We want to see
BIG NAME teams.”
On cue, East Carolina
began to schedule some of those big name teams, like Miami.
Still, the crowds did not
fill up the stadium, which then held only some 30,000.
The excuse then came down to,
“We want to see North Carolina or N.C. State, or Duke or Wake Forest in
here.”
Sure enough, when the Tar
Heels or Wolfpack made those couple of trips down to Greenville, there
was a crowd. Even when the fans had to troop to Raleigh or Chapel Hill
or Charlotte, they made their way west for the games. Wake and Duke have drawn a lesser amount.
But the games that mean the
most now, the Southern Misses, the Houstons, the Tulanes and so on,
didn’t come near drawing the same kinds of crowds.
When the winning stopped
a couple of years ago, the sunshine fans deserted once again.
Yes, East Carolina does have
some great fans. I’ve seen it over the years. There is that die-hard
group that would come if the Pirates were 0-10 and playing the Sisters
of the Poor. Every school has that support.
But it’s the rest of the
fans, those who say they come when the Pirates are winning, those who
come when they’re playing the top teams in the country, and those who
only show up for an ACC opponent (read UNC-CH or NCSU), who need to be
there every week.
They need to be showing that
they love the Pirates, win or lose, regardless of the opponent. Only
then will East Carolina be able to generate the kind of of sustained
support that will be irresistible to a BCS league looking to expand.
