When this covid thing is over, I'm gonna meet with Bohn on those coaches tour to the Bay Area to discuss about revamping seating at Galen to make it a better experience. The students for starters deserve better seating.

That is awesome Troywonder!

This year could be the beginning of something special for SC basketball.

Disagree on students deserving better seating.

I have been a season ticket holder for many years. There's always an excuse for why the students don't show up. First it was that the Sports Arena was too far away but if you built it on campus they would come. It didn't happen so now it's the seat location. I sit behind the opposite basket and they are great seats. Yet, many times there are so few students that I can actually count them. The problem goes much deeper than seat location.

Also, don't forget who paid for building Galen. The sideline seats required large donations for seat licenses. It would be morally wrong to take away the good seats. Many alumni already hate the current administration and donations to SC have tanked. The answer isn't to further alienate long time supporters.

Unfortunately, many of them are often empty. There needs to be a system for filling those seats when the owners aren't attending. Also a separate plan needs to be put in place for filling the upper level.

Amazingly, students and season ticket holders all show up for UCLA and other big conference games. There needs to be a comprehensive plan to improve attendance, but many things have been tried over the years.

It is such a shame we can't attend this year and Saturday would be packed. Winning consistently is a big part of any solution.

Yes alumni season ticket holders deserve good seats, I don't think anyone's disputing that. What they don't deserve is to be on camera. Just give the students the 2 sections behind USC's bench so that they can go crazy and hype up the broadcast similar to how students get prime Coli corner seats on the sideline by the end zone. The damage of seeing empty seats and half asleep older donors and alumni crossing their arms on the telecast is doing irreparable damage to USC's game day experience brand. Behind the basket seats are also really good and alumni will enjoy being that close, but NOT on the telecast. Move the season ticket holders that fail to consistently fill their seat behind the basket. It's making fans not want to attend games or watch the team play with how dead Galen looks on camera.

The problem is that students are not socialized properly to go to basketball games. It should be part of freshman orientation that the thing to do on Thursday and Saturday is to go to Galen. The school does very little outreach on behalf of the basketball program. It is all geared toward football.

Believe me, there is a ton of things that could be done to get students to show up, and very little effort is made. This enables the administration to rationalize their lack of effort.

I was an orientation advisor, and there used to be a booth promoting basketball at the student activities fair on day 2. I seem to have a recollection they phased that out. The problem is football starts right at the beginning of the year, so you sweep the freshman up in that momentum, but basketball doesn’t start until months later. At the beginning of the season every single freshman goes to the football games; after a month or two the attendance starts to dip a little.

What might be a solution is a midnight madness type event early in the semester. They did one my freshman year and it was pretty cool, but Floyd subsequently eschewed it because the team lost their season opener to Mercer.

There are all kinds of ways to get students to go to games.

Free food with a used ticket stub.
Have musical acts show up afterward in Galen. Turn it into a rave.
Get the Trojan Knights and Trojan Spirit groups to round up clueless freshmen in nearby dorms to go to games.
The more games you go to, you punch a ticket and can get a prize after, like a Subway card.
Etc. Etc.

But the smarter thing to do is encourage blue collar people in the neighborhood to come. The way you do that is give them a free cheap seats football ticket after they attend a basketball game.

None of these things have been tried on a consistent, enthusiastic basis by USC. It just hasn't cared enough about basketball for decades upon decades. And the administration is a huge culprit.

Only tweak I have to your post is that the students should be behind the visiting section. That’s going to be a raucous crowd right there.

Trojan2011

I think they should go even deeper. College football in LA is an event in and of itself, and with two high octane college basketball programs, bball can become that way too. SC should be filling the rafters with high school kids from all over the LA area so that they grow up on SC basketball. In turn, some of them will start going to games and possibly bring their families. Run bball camps of course so you can be "just like the players" and so on...

Honestly, I think getting an SC player onto the Clippers/Lakers would be huge for us, since those brands are already so established in LA. That will come with time.

Rave idea is slick.. Do any existing programs do that? I'm not sure just how much control the administration has over what they can do with Galen. I mean, is ambition the only missing variable?

I’m not saying alumni and donors should get shafted but I think the students are being robbed a fun experience that prevents from coming back to Galen after they graduate. Part of it is the admin and part of it are the students themselves

here’s a pic of the student sections at the SMU game back in 2016.

I graduated in 2012, and I felt like very little was done to encourage students to attend the games. My sister goes there now, and it still seems to be the case. The yellow Trojan Fever shirts from welcome week were always a hit but I didn't really see that early-year activity materialize into more enthusiasm for the teams. The pizza giveaways didn't really do much because you wouldn't know they were giving out pizza unless you went to the games regularly. It was also usually awkward when the 8 or so of us that were in the student section would each get a box to ourselves... I was a Resident Advisor and there was an attempt my senior year to encourage attendance, but it was a disaster. They assigned points by residential building to track attendance, but there wasn't a way for the residents to see how they compared to other halls. I took my residents on a few occasions but it also didn't help that the men's side only won one conference game that year. Fun fact though: we all anticipated that we'd beat Utah, so I think there was a spike in attendance for that game compared to the others.

I really do think seating should change significantly at Galen. The camera faces the wrong side. When you enter Galen (not as a student but as a general fan), you're inclined to sit closest to the entrance, or the side adjacent to Figueroa. That means that people usually don't go to the other side of Galen, which is the side that is televised. You can have a full section on the Fig side but you'd never know because the televised side is empty. What's worse is that for too many games (including women's bball and volleyball), the fans from the opposing team will sit behind their players, so it'll often seem like the other team has more fans than us. It seems like an easy fix overall.

I have been a season ticket holder since the 1990s. Myself and other season ticket holders around me have been happy to share our seats with students whenever someone didn’t show up. This was especially so when my kids were students and brought other students over. Let’s have that problem so we can solve it. Loved those few games games when the house was packed with students filling up sections even upstairs. Most every seat at Galen is a good one. At a minimum we can asked that season ticket owner allow students to come fill empty seats around us. The enthusiasm would be welcomed.

As far as students failing to show up to games, a lot needs to be done to identify, recruit and grow a small crew of USC student die hards who want to go to every game. I assume this is the role that the Trojan Fever organization would like to play, but it seems like they need help, a lot of help.

Right now, a lot of the promotions seem haphazard and headless like they're trying to convince random students who've never watched basketball in their lives to show up to games. Find the true college basketball fan students and give them the resources/support they need to develop into lifelong die hards that grow their ranks: photo ops with coaches/players, free body paint supplies, T-shirts to wear to every game, catered leadership meetings to come up with plans to grow die hards with a promotional budget to execute their plans. Give those die hards consistent seating front and center on the telecast. There should be a paid position in the AD for student outreach, ideally someone who's had success building student communities elsewhere.