Student Turnout at Sports Games, Often Measly, Needs to Increase

If it seemed, at first, like a shimmering mirage, that’s because it’s a woefully rare sight.

Students stuffing the WHS gym, crowding into the bleachers, their shoulders brushing in the stands, their chants gushing into the air. Delirium. 

It was a Thursday night in February, and a couple hundred students had amassed to watch a boys basketball sectional quarterfinal against Scotch Plains-Fanwood. Tickets sold out. Students and adults flocked to the gym to watch. Excitement hung in the air. 

The problem? 

The small, generally hospitable gym had not, over 10 weeks of basketball, seen an atmosphere remotely as bouncy as this. No chance. Not even close. 

The blue bleachers had often been bare, begging to be filled, standing silent sentinel over the frenetic, gripping, thrilling basketball games unfolding in the gym. Most games transpired before small crowds composed mainly of parents. The exception: The two Senior Day games featured swollen home crowds.

But, by and large, student attendance had been measly. Embarrassingly so. 

Until, that was, the sectional quarterfinal against SPF. Coach James McKeon called it the most memorable game of his career—because of the atmosphere. He told his players to drink it in, to relish it, and by all accounts they did. 

Westfield won, 59–56, and the white-clad students stormed the court. A week later, reflecting on the game, McKeon was left with only one tinge of regret.

“I wish,” he said, “it was more often from the student body.”

The atmosphere, that is. The congregation of students that generates such energy, such excitement. The beautiful environment that, McKeon said, enhances the athletes’ performance.

“The students get in there,” McKeon said, “and they’re like, ‘oh my god, that was a blast.’ Every game could be that way.”

To expect every game to be that way is, if we’re honest, a bit of wishful thinking. It would, of course, be amazing. It is, of course, unrealistic. The Dean E. Smith Center, the University of North Carolina’s basketball arena, will never teem with fans the same way for a game against, say, Wake Forest as it will for a heated rivalry meeting with Duke. 

Student attendance, at Westfield, is a tale of two extremes. 

The first extreme, the one visible during that glorious February night against SPF, crops up for an exalted set of designated games. County and sectional championship games. Soccer games against SPF. Lacrosse games against Summit. Maybe a couple other standouts.

Each of these is assigned a “theme” by the Instagram account @dubfieldathletics: blueout, whiteout, blackout, etc. The assignment, by Dubfield, of a theme attaches the game with importance.

The game becomes an event. Students attend in droves. 

But what happens to the games bereft of that status? The regular-season games, the ones against Cranford or Elizabeth or Plainfield or a non-conference opponent? The ones that are not events?

This is the second extreme. 

Maybe a few students attend, the ones stopping by after practice for their own sport or the ones who come to watch their best friends play. But, in large part, these games are bereft of students. 

It’s a shame. 

Why don’t they come? There’s homework to do, yes, and responsibilities to fulfill. But it feels like it requires a concerted effort to drive students to games. Dubfield has to post about it. People have to communicate about it. The game must, in order to force students off their beds and out of their desk chairs, become an event. 

Look at what’s happened thus far this school year. Football, the sport which usually draws the most student attention, faced miserable student turnout. Less than half of the games boasted respectable attendance—none had the type of exuberant, overflowing crowds they deserve.

Soccer was a little better, relatively speaking. All the designated games—county semifinals and finals, the pair of boys games against SPF, the final three games of the boys team’s run to the Group 4 semifinals—featured a herd of students. But for the overwhelming majority of regular-season games, there was never more than a smattering of students.

In the winter, turnout for boys hockey was surprisingly low. Both basketball teams usually played before stands devoid of students. Yet the students came for the SPF boys game and returned for the ensuing game, against Newark East Side—perhaps verifying McKeon’s point that, when students realize how fun attending games can be, they grow eager to return.

But then the winter season ended. We now languish in the lull between seasons, that period of hibernation where high school sports fade to the background. 

And it becomes easy to forget the indescribable thrill, the adrenaline-pumping delirium, of those days and nights when students turn up to games and transform them into something greater.

Let’s have more of those days and nights this spring. Not just during rivalry games. Not just during Senior Day games. Not just during postseason tournament games. 

All the time.