Thursday, Jan. 10, 2002 | 11:35 a.m.
Ron Kantowski's column appears Thursday. His inside notes column appears Tuesday. Reach him at [email protected] or 259-4088.
Befitting a team with a 13-1 record on the cusp of a national ranking, the UNLV Lady Rebels played in front of a rabid sold-out crowd last Sunday.
Too bad they had to travel to New Mexico for the experience.
And it wasn't a capacity crowd of 1,800 crammed into some auxiliary gymnasium on the far edge of campus of which I speak. The New Mexico Lobos and Lady Rebels played in front of 17,215 paying customers at cavernous University Arena, more commonly known by its famous nickname, The Pit. It was the second-largest crowd to watch an NCAA women's game this year.
You probably don't need a road map or John Stockton's court vision to see where this is going. If New Mexico has managed to create a huge following for its women, why can't UNLV do the same for the Lady Rebels, who are the better team (at least this year), as evidenced by Sunday's 62-53 victory?
Granted, there's nothing quite like the devotion of a New Mexico basketball fan. All those bats who make their home in Carslbad Caverns should be glad the Lobos play in Albuquerque, because if they hung a couple of rims from the stalactites, Ozzy Osbourne's little buddies wouldn't have a monopoly on the good seats. In fact, they might have to relocate to Roswell, where they cotton to all kinds of weird flying objects.
But until recently, the passion for New Mexico basketball was reserved for the men's team. In 1994-95, the UNM women sold a grand total of nine season tickets and averaged a paltry 397 fans per game.
Seven years later, the Lobo women rank fifth in the NCAA with an average attendance of 8,653. Eight times since 1999, they have played in front of 16,000 fans or more. These are the "big event" games (such as Sunday's ESPN affair with UNLV) that UNM targets prior to every season.
"We make it a huge event two months out," said Joe Weiss of the New Mexico sports marketing department, "and then we make sure they have a good time, with promotions and giveaways, once they make the commitment (to attend)."
With the Los Alamos labs just up the road, there's a lot of rocket science available to Weiss and company. But he said nonstop advertising and discounted tickets (there were 13,000 available for $2 or less on Sunday) make all that brain power unnecessary when it comes to filling 17,000 seats.
What's sad is that it would take just one crowd of that magnitude to roughly equal the Lady Rebels' attendance for an entire season.
It was going to be different this year, when the Lady Rebels moved into a place of their own, the new Cox Pavilion, which seats a modest 2,500 for women's hoops. Yet, the team has played in front of four figures at Cox just once, and that was for the ribbon-cutting against Cal State Fullerton, when 1,277 showed up.
The sports-marketing types say Las Vegas is a tough sell, because there are so many entertainment options. But I've got news for you -- with the advent of Indian gaming, there's a blackjack table on virtually every mesa overlooking Albuquerque, too. And they've got a better zoo than ours.
Bottom line: When a team is playing as well as the Lady Rebels are, the casino factor almost seems like an excuse why you can't draw a crowd, rather than a valid reason not to.
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