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Published on 02/08/1999 All articles from this issue

Is there anyone here?

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By Pete Borello

Town Crier Staff Writer

Sparse attendance at Foothill College games frustrates supporters

Foothill College students looking for a spacious, relatively quiet place to study might want to try one of the school's sporting events.

Games, meets and matches held on the Los Altos Hills campus typically draw less students than the library, and the decibel levels aren't much higher.

Foothill volleyball star Kristi Lezchuk said her team drew 20-50 fans per match this past season. Those are pretty sparse crowds for a team that went undefeated in Coast Conference play and advanced to the state playoffs. And don't think the players didn't notice.

"If people walked out during the middle of a game, it was like 'Oh,'" said Lezchuk, a Mountain View High graduate. "It wasn't that big of a deal, but it kind of was."

The Foothill men's basketball team, which is competing for a playoff spot, attracted just 84 fans Jan. 27 when it hosted district rival De Anza College. The women's basketball team, also in the post-season hunt, drew only 30 fans for a Feb. 3 home against City College of San Francisco.

The lack of fan support isn't unique to Foothill, however. Foothill athletic director Sue Gatlin said other area community colleges - including De Anza in Cupertino - aren't packing their bleachers, either.

"It's a problem at a lot of community colleges around here," Gatlin said. "There's a lot going on every Friday night; we're competing with a lot of other things going on in the Bay Area. In rural communities where you're the only game in town, attendance is very good."

One of these places is Porterville College in Tulare County, where it's not uncommon to see 2,000 fans at a men's basketball game. That's at least 10 times more than what Foothill is drawing per game, according to men's basketball coach Todd Petersen.

Since its impossible to just pick up the college and move it to a place like Tracy or Modesto, Foothill has to find other ways to attract fans. Problem is, no one has figured out a way to do so.

"I don't know what the answer is," said Gatlin, in her third year as athletic director. "Maybe we need to do a better job of marketing our sports teams, which is something we're looking at. We'd like to do more marketing on campus and have more ticket giveaways."

Appealing to the student body is probably a good place to start. Foothill enrolled 14,927 students during the 1997-98 school year. It's a good bet most of them haven't seen one of Foothill's 13 athletic teams in action.

Los Altos resident Amie Prichard could be included among this group. Although she competes on the women's water polo and swim teams, the freshman admits she's never been to a Foothill sporting event she wasn't a part of.

Prichard said she's too busy to attend other athletic events, and she's apparently not alone. Time constraints may be the biggest reason more students don't support their college teams, according to Gatlin.

"They don't have as much free time as they did in high school," she said. "They have more commitments. A lot of them have to work and go to school."

Gatlin said attempts to reach beyond the confines of the campus to attract fans haven't worked, either. The major way to generate public interest is through media attention. But the Bay Area's major media outlets, like the San Jose Mercury News, rarely cover community college sports.

"The lack of coverage doesn't help," Gatlin said. "We've talked to the Mercury at length and they haven't been interested."

The Foothill football team didn't even get a mention in the Mercury when it beat West Valley College in last December's Kiwanis-Silicon Valley Bowl, which capped the best season in school history. Approximately 500 fans attended the game, marking Foothill's biggest crowd of the year.

The football team and other sports programs at Foothill are relying more and more on players from outside the local area, though. While this might make the teams better, it doesn't do much for attendance.

"There used to be more local players on the teams and they had more of a following because their families came to watch them," said Ron Oburn, athletic director at Foothill from 1988-95. "But it's getting harder to get local athletes to play here because a lot of them go off to four-year schools."

There's only one player on Foothill's women's basketball team who attended high school in Mountain View or Los Altos - St. Francis High product Shawna McGlennon. The men's basketball team doesn't have a single player from either of these cities.

Twenty-nine of the 52 players on the 1998 football team came from beyond the Bay Area. And four of the eight players on the 1998 volleyball team were from Hawaii.

"We have a lot of out-of-state athletes and you aren't going to get that family following," volleyball coach Arno Dominguez said. "The families of local players come out to most of the games and they make up a good part of our crowd."

Whether fans show up or not, Foothill coaches and administrators agree that community college sports will live on.

"I've always said that junior college sports are more for the kids than anything," Petersen said. "The objective is to get them into a four-year school."

That's something Foothill has been quite successful at, according to Gatlin. The football team transfers 10-15 players per year, she said, and all three sophomores on last year's women's basketball team have moved on.

Dominguez said he expects four of his volleyball players to continue their careers at four-year schools next fall. This includes Lezchuk, who's drawn interest from six universities.

So even if there aren't a lot of fans in the stands, there's bound to be a college coach or two looking for potential players. And in the long run, they may prove to be the most important spectators of all.