By Alex Faust, News Staff
Over the past four years, I’ve been fortunate enough to visit over two dozen different sports venues on college campuses – from teeny hockey rinks to the biggest college football stadiums. After each visit, I take home a few mental notes of what other schools do to make their fan experiences unique. The takeaways are always different, but I always think about how the best practices elsewhere can be applied at Northeastern.
I’ve learned that in order to be taken seriously and to better engage the student body, it’s important for an athletic program to go the extra mile, to constantly strive to be the best – whether it comes to fan experience, media relations or student-athlete performance. In order to do that, a culture change is long overdue. I’ve long criticized the “culture of ‘no’” at Northeastern that leads to denials and excuses rather than solutions (this is not solely confined to athletics – ‘NU shuffle’ anyone?). This isn’t being “hard to please” or acting spoiled when things go well – if there are areas of improvement, even after successes, capitalizing on them is a must.
In addition, the onus is on students to perpetuate a winning culture. Fraternities and sororities should be ashamed of their behavior at the Nov. 18 Homecoming basketball game: flocks of them left at halftime after the Homecoming Court was announced. When I asked one student why she was leaving, the disgraceful answer she gave me was, “if it’s not Greek life, I don’t give a f***.” For you fans, now is the time to amplify your support: if you’re going to a game, go for the right reasons. In addition, if you see something at games that you don’t like or it needs improvement, speak up. The game-day experience won’t improve without your feedback.
Why are these things important? Because the tide is turning at Northeastern. It may be a slow, grinding and painful process, but the years of suffering heartbreak after heartbreak may finally be reaching a payoff soon.
Consider the progress made over the last few seasons with efficiency gains (cutting football), as well as investments in facilities. Add in a few NCAA tournament appearances and it’s easy to sit back and say “wow, look at how far we’ve come.” But that’s the thing – being “better” is never good enough. A winning culture means always striving to be the best, not just being competitive. There’s always a leap that can be made.
Going to ‘big-time’ college sports events puts things in perspective. Watching Michigan-Ohio State at Michigan Stadium surrounded by 114,000 people will do that to you. As easy as it is to whine and complain about what Northeastern does or does not do (I’m guilty of doing this on multiple occasions, including here), it is hard to escape what we actually are. We are a private school in a cosmopolitan city, whose sports success history is barely sustainable. We are enrolling more and more students from outside New England who arrive with vastly different expectations of their college than they had 20, 10 or even five years ago.
Northeastern won’t be the next Michigan, or Duke or any other big-name school you can think of – there are geographic, enrollment and monetary hurdles to that. Yet NU can still build a winning culture, something that these big-name schools have seemed to master. Investing in people and rewarding best practice is something these programs do every day, something that any successful business venture would do. Northeastern should follow suit.
