Attendance at Kincaid Ospreys basketball games has nearly doubled over the past two seasons, a shift coach Dominic Reyes says has changed the atmosphere inside a gym that used to feel half empty on weeknights.
Average home attendance is up 68 percent compared to two seasons ago, according to figures released by the athletic department, with six of the team’s first eight home games this season selling out the on-campus arena’s roughly 1,200-seat capacity. Athletic department officials said the increase tracks closely with the program’s rise from a middling finish two years ago to last season’s conference tournament semifinal appearance, its deepest postseason run in a decade.
Coach Dominic Reyes said the shift has been noticeable inside the building, not just on the attendance sheet. “Two years ago you could hear individual conversations in the stands during a close game,” Reyes said. “Now our student section is standing for the last four minutes of games, which sounds small, but it’s a completely different environment for these players to compete in.”
A bigger stage downtown
The growth has pushed the athletic department to schedule more of the season’s marquee games at the larger Anchor Arena downtown, a venue the Ospreys have used sparingly in past years but now plan to use for at least three games this season, up from one last year. Senior guard Malik Sorensen said the larger venue has become something players look forward to rather than a novelty. “Last year our one game at Anchor Arena felt like the biggest night of the season,” Sorensen said. “Getting to do that three times this year means recruits get to see, on video, that this program can fill a real arena, not just our home gym.”
Reyes said the athletic department is exploring whether a fourth Anchor Arena date, potentially for a late-season game against a conference rival, makes sense if the current attendance trend holds. “We don’t want to overextend and end up playing to a half-full Anchor Arena instead of a packed home gym,” he said. “But if this keeps up through January, that’s a conversation we’re going to have.”
Winning fixes a lot of things that marketing budgets can’t. We didn’t do anything radically different in how we promoted these games. We just started winning games that mattered, and people who had never been to a game started showing up to see what the fuss was about.
Dominic Reyes, Head Coach, Kincaid Ospreys
Alumni and students both showing up
The athletic department said roughly 40 percent of the attendance growth has come from alumni ticket purchases rather than current students, a trend officials said suggests the program’s success is drawing back graduates who had drifted away from following the team. Forward Caleb Whitmore said alumni have started reaching out to players directly on social media in ways he said never happened during his first two seasons on campus. “I’ve had alumni from a decade ago message me congratulating us after games,” Whitmore said. “That’s a completely different level of attention than this program is used to.”
Kincaid’s dean of admissions has also noted the attendance growth in campus tours, according to Reyes, who said he has been asked to speak to prospective student groups about the team’s rise more often this year than in any previous season. “I don’t think a lot of families choose Kincaid because of the basketball team,” Reyes said. “But if a packed gym on a Saturday afternoon helps a prospective student feel like this is a school with some energy to it, I’m glad to be part of that pitch.”
Sustaining the surge
Reyes said the real test of the attendance growth will be whether it holds if the team has a down season at some point, something he said every program eventually experiences. “Attendance follows winning, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t aware that this could reverse just as fast as it grew,” he said. “Our job now is to build a program good enough, year after year, that people keep showing up even in a season where we don’t make another run like last year’s.” Sorensen, in his final season, said he hopes the crowds outlast his own eligibility. “I’d love to come back in five years and see this gym still full,” he said. “That would mean this wasn’t just about one good team. It would mean something actually changed here.”
The athletic department said it has also begun fielding more sponsorship inquiries tied to basketball specifically, a category that had previously been dominated almost entirely by the university’s rowing and soccer programs in past years. Reyes said he was surprised to learn a Foundry Row biotech firm had approached the department about sponsoring court signage, a level of business interest he said the program has never previously attracted. “We’re a Division III program at a school known for its journalism graduates,” he said. “Having a biotech company want their name on our court is not something I expected two years ago, and I think it’s a pretty direct signal of how much the perception of this program has shifted around campus and in the city.”
Whitmore said the team has tried not to let the attention change how it approaches practice, worried that comfort with the new crowds could dull the urgency that fueled last year’s tournament run in the first place. “It’s easy to get comfortable when people are cheering for you every night instead of a quarter-full gym,” he said. “Coach reminds us pretty regularly that the crowd showed up because of how we played, not the other way around, and if we stop playing that way, the crowd won’t stick around to watch us figure it out.”