The attendance for women’s basketball games is slowly on the rise, but it still lags behind attendance at the men’s game.
Women’s basketball is the only Ohio University varsity athletic team to earn a national tournament berth this year.
Despite the meteoric rise of the women’s team, student attendance at the men’s home games was an average of 11 times higher than the student turnout for women’s games hosted before Feb. 16, when Ohio Athletics provided student attendance data to The Post. The women’s team hosted four more regular season games after Feb. 16; the men’s team hosted three.
“Having men’s basketball crowds larger than your women’s games is fairly common, so I would not say it is concerning,” Michael Stephens, senior associate athletic director for external operations, said in an email.
The men’s team, which went 10-20 and finished its season with a first-round loss in the Mid-American Conference Tournament, saw an average of almost 3,000 students at every home game as of Feb. 16, according to the data. The team recorded its highest student attendance during its first game of the season against Marietta. More than 5,000 students were in attendance for the Bobcats’ 82-69 win.
The best student turnout for a home women’s basketball game as of Feb. 16 was 562 students, when the Bobcats topped Akron by 12 points in late January.
The women’s team won the MAC Tournament this past weekend and is slated to face Arizona State on Saturday in the first round of the NCAA Tournament in Tempe, Arizona. The team is in the midst of its best season since its 1985-86 campaign.
“I think that there has been a stereotype that has persisted for years and years that women's sports are just not as exciting as men’s sports,” Kim Little, associate director of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, said. “And I think that that is a stereotype that is based upon archaic ideas about gender and about the skill levels of male athletes versus female athletes.”
Little has attended many women’s games but said she didn’t go to any men’s games this season.
“I tried to go to as many (women’s games) as humanly possible,” Little said. “I noticed more people there this year than I noticed last year.”
Ohio Athletics generally schedules its giveaways and promotions in conjunction with the better-attended men’s basketball games, hoping to attract a large student crowd, Stephens said.
“We have not done as many promotions for the women’s games but will in the future as we see it as a growth sport here at Ohio,” Stephens said in an email. “We promoted the women’s team during the season on our website, through emails to our fan base, through social media, in live reads during men’s basketball games, through in-store sponsor promotions and in some paid print advertising.”
Many of the promotions are part of Athletics’ standard marketing plan for sports, he said.
Athletics hasn’t switched up its marketing strategy now that the women’s team has made the NCAA Tournament, Stephens said.
Jared Roese, a freshman who has yet to declare a major, said he went to a handful of men’s basketball games this season, but he didn’t make it to The Convo to catch a women’s game.
“I’ve always seen how well they are doing,” Roese said. “It seemed really exciting, but I just never know when the games were, to be honest.”
Stephens said that next season he expects the women’s team to garner a greater following among students because of its recent success.
“While it is too soon to determine a specific marketing plan, we definitely will put some additional resources towards women’s basketball next year,” Stephens said in an email.
Fresh off its best season in program history — regardless of the team’s success in the NCAA Tournament — Ohio will add to its championship banners hanging from the rafters of The Convo next season. Little hopes the team will also see higher attendance figures.
“I think that we need to start convincing people that it is not less exciting to go see a basketball team, regardless of the gender of the players involved,” Little said.
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