Newly ascended Grand Canyon Basketball has been filling their on-campus gym in Phoenix better than anyone might have expected at this point in their program’s development
When the chatter in the depths of the college basketball internet sphere began to swell with talk of Grand Canyon basketball’s close game with New Mexico State on Saturday night, and with rumors of their cheerleaders creating some ridiculous visual to distract visiting free-throw takers (it’s really worth a watch if you can dig it up somewhere), I decided to watch the last couple minutes of the game to see what all of the excitement was about. But when I did turn the game on, the first thing that caught my attention wasn’t the drama on the court, or even that pom-pom wave their cheerleaders must’ve spent hours mastering, it was the raucous crowd clad in purple going absolutely bonkers for their ‘Lopes.
I had seen impressive GCU crowds in the past, most notably against #6 Nevada during the non-conference season this year, in their home city of Phoenix at Talking Stick Resort Arena. As Grand Canyon hung in against Musselman’s team, the packed building continued to grow louder and rowdier before Nevada closed the game out with an eight-point win. I knew the newly-ascended division one university, known as an online school to most in the country, had fans in the Phoenix area, but what I hadn’t understood was how strong the culture is that they’ve built on their campus.
That was until Saturday night, when the 14-8 Antelopes, who the metrics probably favor a fair bit more than the eye test might, were hosting conference-leading New Mexico State. And sure, it was a big game; GCU was in second place in the WAC, and a win over an Aggies team that only topped them by two points in La Cruces last month would’ve created a dead heat at the top of the league. But nothing could’ve convinced me that any regular-season WAC game was big enough to produce the kind of atmosphere that was inside Grand Canyon University Arena on Saturday, especially not at a school like GCU.
For a team that had lost to South Dakota State, Rio Grande, and by almost 40 to Texas, a team that plays in one of the biggest cities in the country that is home to four major professional sports franchises, in a state with two of the biggest college sports brands on the West Coast, for a game in a conference in which the results don’t really matter until its tournament, the GCU community packed their on-campus gym and created an atmosphere that rivals any in the Pacific-12. It put the Saturday afternoon crowd at Pauley Pavilion to shame, among dozens of others in a big day of college hoops.
Think what you want of Grand Canyon as an institution, a school that caused a bit of an uproar among division one athletic departments when it was invited to the Western Athletic Conference as a for-profit school. Think what you want of a division one basketball school popping up on your television begging you to enroll in their online courses, and whatever you will about their messy transition to non-profit status and their perhaps suspicious relationship with their former parent company. What you can’t argue with are the crowds filing into their gym in Phoenix, and, more importantly, that culture they’ve cultivated on campus.
I don’t know how Grand Canyon is doing it. I don’t know how they packed such a raucous crowd into their building for a team that has had full division one status for just over a year. Despite their best efforts, I have still not decided that I needed their assistance in finding my purpose, so I’m not a GCU student, so I don’t know what it is that they’re doing to get so many students and others in Phoenix excited about their basketball program.
What I do know is that they’ve busted every myth that athletic departments and college sports fans claim hold back the efforts of building exactly what GCU has seemingly with the snap of their fingers. “Winning cures all”, fans will say in response to empty arenas, “it’s harder to draw in major cities”, “you need generations to build a strong culture”. Well, Grand Canyon is proving that none of those things are quite true. Or, at the very least, they’re proving these things can be overcome with the proper approach.
And sure, there are things that work in their favor; the team isn’t horrible, and the Phoenix Suns are. Maybe a now 14-9 team is just appealing enough to draw fans perhaps desperate for at least mediocre basketball. But my gut tells me it’s much more than that. My gut tells me Grand Canyon has applied a strategy that has gotten their students and the Phoenix community excited about ‘Lopes basketball, and I think that suspicion can be mostly confirmed by the engaged crowd uniformly dressed in purple GCU gear Saturday night.
I think a lot of athletic departments across the country need to seriously consider whether they’ve done enough to build that culture on their own campuses; my gut tells me that most of them haven’t.