Women’s sports experience trend of lower attendance

The members of the UW women’s basketball team ran across the floor of Hec Edmundson Pavilion, their shoes causing high-pitched squeaks as they traversed the length of the court.

Head coach Tia Jackson’s voice rang out across the cavernous building as she shouted directions to her team.

All the way up on press row, her words were so clear that they could be discerned from the second level of the arena.

The referee’s voice, too, was as clear as his whistle. He had just called a foul and was warning the players not to get too rough with each other.

Such was the scene on Jan. 17, 2009 as an official crowd of 2,694 sat placidly for most of the game, watching the Huskies lose 69-55 to Oregon State.

As Washington falls deeper and deeper into its current losing streak, fewer fans have been attending games. While the Huskies’ season-opener against Gonzaga drew 4,052 fans, the latest home games drew an average attendance of a little over 2,500.

Former Athletic Director Todd Turner said that a lack of “buzz,” tied to consistently low attendance numbers, got former UW women’s basketball coach June Daugherty fired, but the current administration has shown no sign of punishing its coaches if seats don’t sell out.

“We don’t have anything like ‘Tia Jackson, you’re expected to draw 30,000 a game,’” Senior Associate Athletic Director Stephanie Rempe said. “The goal of our sports programs is to go out and compete for championships ... we have a marketing staff and their job is to create excitement in terms of game day atmosphere and all those things.”

Jackson said she doesn’t think about things that are out of her control.

“As humans, we have to guard our minds and keep anything that could remotely be negative out. You could call that my strong Christianity,” Jackson said, referring to job security. “I’m going to go out and be a better coach for these kids and generate as much excitement as I can around our program and I don’t think about that stuff.”

But the numbers do show dwindling attendance. From 2001 to 2006, UW women’s basketball games averaged at least 3,200 attendees per game. This season, the Huskies have an average turnout of 2,794.

But the women’s basketball team is still rebuilding, and it hasn’t made the NCAA Tournament since Daugherty’s last season in 2005-06.

A losing team usually isn’t expected to draw as many fans as when it wins.

What may come as a surprise, however, is that even winning women’s teams at the UW have experienced a relative decline in ticket sales.

The UW volleyball team has been one of the best team sports at Washington in recent years, winning a national championship in the 2005-06 season while consistently making the NCAA Tournament since 2003.

“Our numbers are growing,” volleyball coach Jim McLaughlin said. “I know that our ticket sales continued to increase, in terms of our season tickets.”

McLaughlin is partially correct; attendance had been rising steadily until the 2004-05 season, when the average crowd was 3,211 per game. But since then, the average turnout has settled down to about 2,000 fans per game since 2007.

The softball team, which has had similar success to the volleyball team in recent years, has also experienced slowly declining crowds since the middle of the decade.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the women’s soccer team had been rebuilding for three seasons prior to 2008, when they made the NCAA tournament for the first time in four years.

For them, turnout has been fairly consistent, averaging between 900 and 1,100 in past seasons.

With the exception of women’s soccer, the numbers appear to show that women’s sports seem to be experiencing an attendance downturn at the UW.

But the game goes on for players and coaches who echo Jackson’s sentiments about concentrating on the game at hand rather than the empty seats in the crowd.

And maybe the attention garnered by women’s sports at the UW is not as bleak as it could be.

For example, while the women’s basketball team here averages more than 2,500 a game at home, when the Dawgs go on the road, opponents average only 1,248 in their house.

“I take pride in the fact that we have a ton of people [coming to the game],” UW guard Sami Whitcomb said. “Traveling to the other Pac-10 schools ... it’s always kind of sad because I don’t feel like they have a lot of people that come out to the games.”

Reach reporter Honsen Lin at sports@dailyuw.com.