Taking office on April 10, new UW-Milwaukee Athletic Director George Koonce faces an uphill climb. He has claimed that he would like to see the men’s basketball program average 7,000 to 9,000 in attendance, a figure that looks staggering to the average UWM fan. To put it in perspective, this past season the Panthers averaged 3,275 fans at the U.S. Cellular Arena. Koonce and Head Coach Rob Jeter have their work cut out for them if they want to fill up the Cell, but is that the arena they want to fill?
Certainly, men’s basketball is the crown jewel of our athletic department, as it is at hundreds of universities in the country that don’t play football (i.e. Marquette University) or are just better at basketball (i.e. Michigan State). And as George Koonce has stated several times, athletics are the front door of the university. “Athletics is the front porch of the university. In this country, athletics make up 85 percent of news about a university,” Koonce said during his public forum this winter. So the question I pose is this: shouldn’t the university’s “front porch” be connected to the house?
The U.S. Cellular Arena is located downtown. There are certainly enough amenities to accommodate 7,000 fans down there before and after the game; anyone who has enjoyed a BBQ rib sandwich at Major Goolsby’s will attest to that. But the university is barely a part of the equation.
Preferably, a news-making asset like university’s basketball team would play on campus. When you have thousands of alumni and season ticket holders coming on to campus every game day they get to see the campus. They get to see the facilities they used when they were students, and they become a part of the campus community. As great a job as the Alumni Association does, I’m sure they’ll be the first to tell you that their job would be a lot easier if Jeter’s crew took the floor at the Kenwood Campus. And when the alumni are connected, they donate. Donors are funding the university more and more every year as the state shrinks its support. The donors need to be brought to campus, and men’s basketball would bring thousands of them on campus during the winter.
Students complain to me constantly about the Cell. They wait for up to an hour after games in the cold to get a ride back to the dorms, and that’s too bad. Many students don’t go to games for this very reason. If the Klotsche Center arena would be ripped down and rebuilt as a five-star basketball temple, if you will, the student attendance problem would disappear. It has gotten much better in the last two years, with hundreds making the trip for every game at the Cell. But that number should be in the thousands, when we have 29,000 Panthers on campus, many of whom are sports fans.
Personally, I would not condone bringing the team back right away. Simply adding seats to go above the Horizon League minimum capacity of 5,000 would not do the program any good. The second Koonce’s transition period is over fundraising has to be done to get the basketball team back to campus, and in a great arena at that. After I graduate, I’d much rather come back to campus to watch a basketball game than to the U.S. Cellular Arena. Wouldn’t you?
