Attendance Next Year

What do you guys think?  Most likely we won't be as good in terms of ranking and wins, but we will almost certainly have an exciting team full of young, athletic players.  We have a ton of quality teams coming to the Garden:  UCLA, Syracuse, etc. 

Has attending STJ games become a part of life for fans again?  Will we climb towards a 10 g's a game or stay the same? 

We had the fourth largest increase from from the previous season (thank you Coach Lavin!!!) at an increase of 2,324 fans (38%!!).  With an average of 8,431 fans, we were #57 out of 335 D1 teams last year in attendance according to NCAA.org.   http://www.ncaa.org/wps/wcm/connect/bdf2030046a3609298bddcc110a6426c/2011_NCAA_mens_basketball_attendance.pdf?MOD=AJPERES&CACHEID=bdf2030046a3609298bddcc110a6426c

A little shocking from the rankings is that UCLA was below us at #65 (7,759 fans per game) and Marquette was #11 (15,586) and #22 Creighton (13,507) were very high. 

The non-football schools looked pretty strong actually.

#11 Marquette
#22 Creighton
#25 G'Town
#27 Dayton
#38 Villanova
#40 Wichita St.
#44 Xavier
#56 Bradley
#57 St. John's
#62 Seton Hall
#66 Old Dominion
#67 Depaul
#68 Siena
#69 Mizz St.
#76 Providence
#80 VCU
#84 St. Louis
#87 Charltotte
#88 Gonzaga
#89 Richmond
#91 George Mason

I think we move up attendance but not huge this year because I think we will be taking our lumps. I have 3 tickets with Marbles and am adding a 4th right now for a friend who has adopted our team as his own now

Attendance for garden games should steadily increase because the casual college bball fan saw SJU trash Duke, Uconn amongst others on national tv last year.  We will be on tv in early season tournaments, and if we make it exciting, we should see it translate to attendance figures. 

I think we can expect to see a big increase in student season ticket packages with the success of last year's squad.