Welcome!

Welcome to our forum, Greg!

Hey Greg first thing do not feel like you are an outsider. Uc davis is a very welcoming place as are all Aggies fans. I realize Oklahoma is very different from California ( i had many clients in OK when I was practicing law) but davis is a pretty cool little town. You will feel welcome here. I spent many a nice day in Stillwater and it felt a lot like davis for me. Even got my hair cut there and it was excellent!

welcome aboard Greg.

Hi Greg and welcome.

I have always felt that sports other than basketball and football have been under-represented at UC Davis for a long time. Clearly the feeling is that they need to spend the most time and energy on the sports that bring in the most fans, and I get that. However, under-representing other sports because the university feels that fewer people care represents something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If UCD doesn't market or just get the information out about these sports because it thinks people mostly don't care then they definitely won't.

I have always felt UCD has done a woefully inadequate job of getting marketing and program information out about baseball and softball. Then there are the much smaller programs you hear almost nothing about, like lacrosse and field hockey. People might like them if they went to a match, but they have to do all the research themselves to find out the where, when, and why they should go.

I probably don't need to tell you that baseball is a much bigger deal at Oklahoma State than it is in Davis. That's to be expected in a smaller community, but in Davis it is a very minor sport. Most of the fans seem to be family of the players. Most of the student attendees seem to either be friends of the student-athletes or student-wthletes from other sports blowing off steam by watching other people work. There just isn't much community support in terms of attendance. UCD would probably do well to look at how CAL markets baseball-they've had a very good crowd at Sunday games I've attended in the past.

Specific to baseball the university does a poor job of getting information out. You pretty much hear nothing about the team between June and early February unless you regularly view the team Twitter account.. Articles about what's going on and why we should be excited are definitely missing. Pretty much the only articles we get about baseball are game recaps.

I also in very limited contact with the athletic dept have generally gotten the impression that they see baseball inquiries as nuisances. I get very short and uninformative responses where it's obvious no research was done. The answers generally range from no, I don't know, to it's the coach's fault I don't know.

Welcome Greg! You’ll get great (free) advice here, lol. Free giveaways are always popular, such as the student bike giveaways at football games this season, and free T shirts are always nice. But on a bigger scope, our student base these days has a large contingent of international students. Football and basketball may not have been part of their culture. Educating the students about these sports regarding how fun it is to attend and when do you cheer, when do you make noise, and when should you be quiet. How about recognizing a group of students who are attending their first football game? Give them a free shirt to wear and recognize them during the game.

Bring back the wrestling program, and start a new women's team!

@MTBAggie:
Being an Oklahoma State guy, I'm all about wrestling, but afraid I have little say in that matter.

@AggieFinn2
I'm going to meet you at least halfway here. I've already elevated baseball, softball, and wbb up to the same levels at least in terms of spent time resources as football and mbb. All of the other sports are at least getting better guidance now than they were, but it's going to take a little time. WSOC has been killing it in the spring, just need everyone else to follow suit.

UCD also went all-in on Instagram at the expense of other social platforms and communications outlets, I'm slowly getting that reversed.

Thanks, everyone else for the advice, always feel free to poke me for comments, criticisms or suggestions. I need input from as many people as possible.

Welcome to our little community Greg!

I think that something a lot of us have talked about over the years is getting more highlights from games up on social media with appropriate game recap videos, etc. I primarily use twitter for sports news and whatnot and It seems like in the past we never got much in terms of that kind of stuff even for the big sports let alone the smaller ones.

Yeah, should have noticed a bit of an uptick in that this year. We now have the WSC clipping system for Football and Men's Basketball that auto-produces highlights that I've started pushing at the end of October after every game. It's usually later at night, like 2 hours after a game so they might be missed, but I'm also going to be putting them on YouTube.

For everything else, if it's on ESPN+ regardless of sport it will likely have rough highlights cut for it and posted. If it's not on ESPN, it might be pretty thin on video content.

Thou we are still well short on staffing for these sorts of things compared to P5 and G5 schools, so it's going to be a process.

hello and welcome! I believe in the 15+ year history of this (and the predecessor) board, you are the first staff person identify yourself, though I’m sure there have been plenty of lurkers. Nice to have you here! My connection to athletics, I’ve been going to Aggie football games since before I could talk, spent four years in the Aggie Band-uh back when we travelled to every single away game (the real band, not this new (sorry) Midwest high school knockoff band), and now I’m a fan from the eastern time zone.

The culture at UC Davis has historically been kind of simple and folksy but aged just to a fine maturity. Back along about 2007, Athletics and the university as a whole decided they were going to go with this “we’re big time now” persona—and it never really worked in the “is that your father’s suit jacket?” kind of way. And while they were busy doing whatever “big time things” they were doing, were sort of late to the party on social media (or even keeping the website up to date). To me the “voice” on social media has been like following IBM or Pfizer—not super timely, odd forced jokes, the appearance that every photo of students is staged and perfectly balanced with one of every race and gender and posts tend to just be announcements, not interactions (and comments get censored). There’s something to be said for the way Wendy’s and Universal Studios engage with people online.

When I think about the ESPN+ coverage, it’s weird they there’s no pregame/postgame show. We just jump in (if we’re lucky, sometimes due to technical issues we kiss a minute of the game. We can also sometimes hear the talent when they they think they are off the air and aren’t). And at the end they rush off the air like the sopranos are coming on… but it’s a stream, there is no other show starting. Back in the days when it was radio only—KHTK and KDVS, there was meaningful pre and post commentary.

As far as student interest and engagement, there’s the elephant in the room—as the university population has become more female and more Asian/Asian American, interest in athletics has dropped. I guess nobody has figured out how to make it relevant to some groups. That said, back in the 90s and 2000s there was more spirit. For example the Aggie Pack didn’t just have an emcee, there were “characters” that were part of an ongoing skit all season long and sometimes they would get together with the band and kind of push the envelope and really get the crowd going. If you were a student, you got an Aggie Pack card and non-students could get an Aggie Fanatics card. At every athletics event, you would get Aggie Bucks for signing in with one of those cards. Most games also had a giveaway item, candy, water bottle, etc usually a sponsored item. They would also hand out Aggie Bucks during the game—popular was tube sock madness where they would use a potato gun to launch tube socks full of Aggie Bucks and coupons. Sometimes they would hand them out at the exit gate too (helped people want to stay 4 quarters!). You could use the Aggie Bucks to buy merch, so fundamentally everyone in the stadium could get an Aggie Pack or Aggie Fanatics shirt free. And then whoever was working on “big time ideas” nixed all of that and decided it would actually be better to have no giveaways and just the bookstore selling $35 adidas T-shirts.

A LOUDER steam engine sound, similar to our D2 playoff days. On the field?

Cow bells?

Not sure why we struggle to put out FB game highlights, or does Coach Hawkins think that hurts
us? I would think those would have a big impact on recruits, and they would forward those clips to their HS classmates.

I appreciate the response and I did actually notice that we were getting some more highlights throughout football season. I'm glad to hear that you're doing your best to modernize Aggie athletics!

GO AGS!

To be fair I think baseball is kind of a hard sell to students (other than the participants) anyway at UCD. Tuesday and Friday games often conflict with classes and weekend games eat into study time. I think even if there were the capacity to have night games at Dobbins Stadium you wouldn't see significantly more students because that's still study time. If the students were less serious about academics maybe.

I have noticed some good student attendance on Saturdays when there were giveaways. It's kind of a challenge making it relevant to them. And if they don't get hooked as students they don't come to the baseball games as alumni. Football has a wide enough appeal (as you can see from the articles on this forum) where this isn't a requirement. The only person I recognize from my student days when I attend is a former player. I maybe average 4-6 per year.

All I know is the SF Giants just signed Mitch Haniger to a three year $40ish million contract and I saw him play against UCD way back when . He hit a homerun in the 9th inning but the Aggies beat Cal Poly anyway. That's all the relevance I need. I also saw Aaron Judge back when he was with Fresno State. Others need more convincing.

So much like Cal the bulk of the attendance really needs to be the Davis community, but how to make it relevant to them is a big question.

If we're talking about concrete things from pre-pandemic times I did enjoy when they used to do articles previewing the team, talking about who might play what position, who the starting pitchers/closer might be and what the coach is excited about. That's mostly gone away. In 2020-2022 that wouldn't have really been feasible. Other schools do that-I don't think there's any benefit to keeping it under wraps. It's not like secrecy wins ballgames. I don't think it's secrecy though, just maybe a perceived lack of fan interest ? I think Coach Nicholson or one of his staff would probably be thrilled to sit down and talk about the team for a bit if it means it would generate even marginally more fan support.

Oklahoma St. crushed the Davis wrestling team from 2006-2009. The head coach at the time was always able to bring in top teams for dual meets.

Story time. My journey in athletics started when I ran an Oklahoma State message board. Would regularly complain about the website and other marketing issues. One day the AD called me and asked me if I thought I could do better, I said yes, and they hired me. lol. So I have a soft spot for message boards and know it's where all the real fans hang out. ;-)