Dartmouth sports teams have had some excellent results over the last two terms. Unfortunately, none of us have really been watching. The Dartmouth ski team won a national championship, but due to the remote nature of skiing few Dartmouth students were able to attend the races. The team had one home carnival, and even that was a 20-minute drive away from campus. Recently, Dartmouth lightweight crew won the Eastern Sprints championship, ahead of many other schools up and down the East Coast. Of course, crew races, even those nearby, make even worse spectator sports. Crew is rarely fun to watch, except during the Olympics when the races are televised. Otherwise, it is far too difficult to follow the course of a race.
Many students lament that Dartmouth athletics are not up to the standard they want. Generally that appears to mean that in the marquee sports, the ones people would attend if we were better, Dartmouth's results are disappointing.
The men's basketball team, a popular team to spectate at many schools, is plagued by low attendance, in large part because it has not boasted a winning record since the 1998-99 season. This year, Dartmouth men's basketball averaged 800 fans per game at home, versus 3405 spectators on the road (though in the team's defense, those road numbers are severely skewed by games at Kansas and UMass).
According to uscho.com, a college hockey website, the Dartmouth women's hockey team averaged 1087 fans for its home games. I am very impressed with the turnout of Dartmouth women's hockey fans (third in the country in attendance, behind the much larger Universities of Wisconsin and Minnesota), but it is very rare that a school averages more fans for women's hockey than men's basketball. Although, given the differing levels of success, it is probably not as surprising as it seems.
The larger question is whether our generally unseen success, or lack of success in typically more marquee sports, breeds a lack of school pride and loyalty. College athletics are often a source of pride, both for students and alumnae, and much of this pride comes from visible successes. Neither skiing nor crew is a particularly visible success, even if I did see two minutes of coverage on CBS a couple weekends ago on the NCAA skiing championships.
I actually do not think our lack of viewable athletic success is the primary cause of poor attendance at many sporting events, though it certainly does not help. In reality, it appears to be a confluence of unfortunate forces.
The Upper Valley does not have a large population, unlike the areas around other colleges and universities, and Dartmouth's student population is too small to sustain a large fan base for more than one or two sports. Without a dominant marquee sport (hockey probably comes first, and there are plenty of undergrads who have yet to attend a game at Thompson Arena), students who might otherwise be caught up in the enthusiasm are simply left behind.
Also, students at Dartmouth do not always have the time to attend sporting events. As a die-hard sports fan, I still can say that I have only attended the games of a handful of different Dartmouth teams in my three years here, and some of those sports I have seen only once. It is not that I do not enjoy going to these contests, but that I cannot always bring myself to spare the time. It may be laziness, but it is also a fact of college life that student attendance is inversely proportional to the distance one has to travel to attend an event. After a week full of work and late nights, sometimes students just want to lounge around on a lazy Saturday or Sunday.
Dartmouth never will be considered one of the elite athletic schools, because we do not have the visible successes of some of our substantially larger peers, and because attendance will always be sizably lower than schools focused more on athletics. This is neither good nor bad, but merely reality. After all, how many of you picked Dartmouth for its sports teams? My guess would be, minus current and former varsity athletes, there are very few.
