On Feb. 11, Rhode Island Women’s Basketball Head Coach Tammi Reiss made a public plea for student attendance; 10 days later, it was “the best student section we’ve ever had.”
Following the team’s blowout of Virginia Commonwealth University by 43 points to extend their program-record winning streak to 16 games, Reiss was asked by Kevin Moore ’20 of NBC 10 WJAR about the lack of a student section despite the team’s success.
“This is a tough school; the students are tough,” Reiss answered. “I don’t know if they’re so into their studies. I may have to go from classroom to classroom and ask, ‘Are we scholars?’ ‘Is that what we are, we don’t like sports here?’”
Eight days after Reiss’s postgame comments, the university’s official student fan organization, Rhody Ruckus, promoted the women’s team for the first time this season.
They announced two giveaways for all students and a raffle for seniors who attended the team’s next home game against Fordham University.
With the women’s team in the middle of a road trip, the men’s team would be reminded of the power of the Ruckus first when they welcomed then No. 18 Saint Louis University on Feb. 17.
The student section was filled to the brim with students dressed in pink for the annual Greek Night and pink-out game. The result was the team’s first win over a ranked opponent in the Ryan Center since 2014, for which head coach Archie Miller gave a lot of credit to the students.
“We don’t win the game without our crowd,” Miller said postgame. “It was a college basketball environment in there tonight.”
Reiss and her team returned to the Ryan Center and hosted Fordham on Saturday for senior day in front of a filled-out student section for the first time this season, recording the best non-education day overall attendance in program history.
“I want to thank the students for coming out,” Reiss said following the team’s 30-point win over Fordham. “It was absolutely amazing. That’s the best student section we’ve ever had. In the end, it was a good day to be a Rhody Ram.”
URI Interim Athletic Director Brittney Miles said that increasing student attendance had been talked about before the VCU game, but with the way in which the team won and played, along with Reiss’s postgame comments, it was a “perfect storm” to make something happen.
Miles worked with Vice President of Student Affairs Ellen Reynolds, Associate Vice President for Enrollment Management and Student Success Dean Libutti and Dean of Pharmacy Kerry LaPlante to bring together any ideas the group had about driving up student interest.
“Libutti actually started a brainstorm document that we were all on,” Miles said. “We were just all adding things to kind of loop it together with senior day, which started to catch a little bit. So it was really an effort in teamwork.”
Miles also talked about the importance of having student-athletes who weren’t in competition at the time show up and support their fellow student-athletes to help make the relationship between the different sports and student-athletes like a family.
“We also did a kind of strategy that [Reiss] wanted to spearhead with getting our student athletes there with some incentives,” Miles said. “To be honest, we didn’t need [incentives], because every coach I called, who wasn’t competing, was like, ‘We’ll be there.’”
In hopes of maintaining this level of student attendance across an entire season, Miles said that there will be more of a focus on appropriately timing giveaways as well as looking into changing how both teams schedule non-conference games to maximize appeal.
