Yeah, I’m not sure what was going on there. It was underwhelming, for sure.
Don’t blame the City of Houston! If I lived in Dallas I wouldn’t care about SMU. If I lived in Austin I wouldn’t care about the Longhorns.
Let’s be honest so we can fix the problem. UH up until recently was a commuter school. We don’t have a loyal fan base or alumni. A lot of UH grads are the first to graduate in their families. We simply don’t have the tradition of other schools.
The burden is on UH Marketing to get the alumni and students to show up. As other threads have pointed out even the students didn’t show up yesterday. This is a UH problem, not a city of Houston problem.
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A bigger problem was the lost 15 years from bad management from about 91-2006. There is a lost generation where we created almost 0 new fans as students came through and lost old ones.
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It’s getting better, just going to take more time. I see so many more young couples these days. As their families grow so will all
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Lot of different factors and we’ve debated them endlessly on this board.
I did hear that many students were out because of midterms and family weekend.
Still think UH ticketing has to get creative. Bring back GA seating for the 200 section endzones, bring back the family packs. Start adjusting pricing in the 300 levels; those corner seats need to be lower priced to get people to sit in them. Offer more giveaways to people entering the stadium.
Need to bring back the caravans before the season as well and get outside of the loop when they do them. Hook up with the alumni associations to help get people out there for them.
Need to have a presence at almost every major event in the city. Have a booth at every pro sports event. Have a booth at the parades, running events, trade shows. Have a presence in the city to where people see you almost wherever they show up.
They do a great job on social media, but they need to realize that social media only reaches so many. Still got to do the legwork and get out and about around the city.
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So enjoy what Briles is bringing to the team just don’t show up in person and support it?
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The biggest thing they can do is keep a consistent ticket plan. It is changed every year and it seems like prices only are going up. I so agree with you about having a pricing strategy that aims at filling the stadium. A poster has stated we are averaging around the capacity of old Robinson Stadium yet the prices have doubled. This means we have doubled our revenue already without selling out TDECU. So start working on filling it up!
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It seemed liked there were a lot more than 31k there based on how crowded the concourses were. Man, the North side was freaking hot yesterday.
You think anybody at UH cares about attendance? This board frets about it, but is anyone’s compensation at UH dependent on it? My guess is no.
They should care because I am pretty sure P5 conferences look at attendance when adding teams, Especially season ticket holder numbers.
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I just watched the highlights of the game. TV did not give the attendance any justice. Looked like a great crowd to me
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Not sure if their own compensation is tied to it at UH, but many of them aren’t from UH and are looking to move up in the industry; selling more tickets is a major key to doing that. The question is, are we hiring people that care about getting more people to the game and improving their resumes.
Of course, it might help if we hired more UH grads that know the city of Houston and are a bit more passionate about UH.
Also, Renu cares. I doubt she’s happy about the attendance right now.
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We need more t-shirt fanssssssssss but t-shirts fans dont care about anyone other than the OU’s of the world
I agree on the middle of the day being detrimental for people with kids in sports. My grandson’s sports activities yesterday prohibited my daughter’s family from coming to the game, as well as my wife. I was the lone guy from my family to show up. But, all 4 of my season tickets counted towards attendance.
Of the students that usually come to the games, I doubt many have children. But many were absent yesterday.
Maybe, but what we really need is for our actual fans in the Houston area to show up at the games instead of driving to “watch parties”. That’s the contingent that’s truly holding us back, from an attendance standpoint.
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Because it’s fun?
Several comments:
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Many no-shows had conflicts. For example, there are 5 people in my group who normally would have been at the game. One man had to work (that accounts for 2 absentees). Another had to attend an event involving his Grandson (that accounts for 2 more, except that I had a guest in town who used 1 of their tickets).
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One reason for so many empty seats is that the Concourse was packed with people avoiding the sun. Happens every day game.
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Many of the seats in the lower East side were owned by people who were in the Club to avoid the sun; those seats were full when the East side got in the shade later in the day.
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We are not the only ones with less than sellouts. Several other schools, in P5 conferences, had the same problem; see above posts.
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So - quit the belly-aching, and enjoy the game!
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Of course - right after the Comical warms up to UH instead of constantly being a shill for UTA, ATM, and the professional teams (but I repeat myself.)! it would be super-nice if we had a genuine HOME-TOWN newspaper!
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Well the problem is not the people on this forum. Believe most here attend. As some as said they need to present this problem to our business school and marketing department and see if they can come up with a solution.
I think Pezman is listening to us as we have seen some changes during the year such as removing of the game beginning chant. One other problem which has always plagued us with these afternoon game is the visitors side sitting in the sun and everybody standing in concourse.
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