On the afternoon of December 4, 2020, the Cleveland State women’s basketball team posted each player’s favorite song on social media.
It probably wasn’t intended as much more than filler content. After all, four days earlier, the Vikings announced the cancellation of the first four scheduled contests of the 2020-21 season, thanks to a positive COVID test within the program. The team would go on to play exactly two games that December, a pair of blowout losses at IUPUI, an inauspicious beginning to an awkward season.
With all of that in mind, a little levity wasn’t an awful idea.
Of course, nothing shines the light of ten million fireflies on a generation gap quite like a discussion of music. Accordingly, CSU’s post forced the 30-plus crowd to google songs like Epidemic by Polo G (Isabelle Gradwell’s selection) and NF’s If You Want Love (Barbara Zieniewska).
There was one notable exception: Taylah Levy, a sophomore guard from Australia, chose Jack and Diane, John Mellencamp’s 1982 ditty about two American kids, doing the best they can.
A couple weeks before that post, I formally committed to getting an MBA at Cleveland State – you can thank Kent State’s lack of evening classes for that one – and, as a “be where your feet are” sort of guy, I was beginning to figure out how I’d weave the Vikings into my delicately-balanced collection of sports fandoms.
Men’s basketball was a given. I had gone to a bunch of games years earlier, during a law school flameout, and was ready to run through a wall after watching every Dennis Gates interview I could find on the internet. Softball was also going to be a part of it, after I got hooked on the sport while working for the now-defunct Akron Racers professional team. Lacrosse was on the list too, as a new team in a cool sport with ground-floor potential.
Women’s basketball didn’t really figure into things, at least not on anything more than a casual “check them out if nothing else is going on” tier.
That began to change when I spotted Levy’s unusual boomer rock song choice, and replied “haha I see you 12.” Shortly after that, the starting point guard began following me. So I began following her.
I followed her as she knocked down three triples in a win over Green Bay that launched a six-game winning streak, erasing a 2-7 start. Then as she helped negate an 18-point third quarter deficit at Youngstown State, including a three with 15 seconds left that gave the Vikings their first lead of the game, and served as the winning points. And, of course, as she helped win the Women’s Basketball Invitational championship with perhaps her best college game, a 16-point, six-steal effort in the semifinals against Stetson.
Then, on June 22, 2021, I published my first post as the CSU women’s beat writer for HoriZone Roundtable.
I’m telling that story as a long-winded explanation of why I think Cleveland State’s Hoops & Scoops initiative, which wrapped up its five-stop summer tour of area Mitchell’s Ice Cream locations in Westlake this week, really hit the mark.
As a concept, Hoops & Scoops was straightforward. From 6:00 until 8:00 on a Monday or a Tuesday evening, CSU athletics set up a tent near the entrance of a Mitchell’s. Underneath the tent, staffers passed out literature and ran The Price is Right-style games aimed at engaging passers-by and handing out a few free tickets. Nearby, Carrie Neville, the school’s associate athletics director of marketing and ticket operations, and the driving force behind the idea, passed out cards redeemable for a free scoop to the first ten people who showed up in Vikings gear.
Finally, but perhaps most crucially, each event included a bunch of representatives from different sports teams. Coaches and players from both basketball squads were always present, and they were joined by a rotating cast from other programs, including volleyball, lacrosse, and tennis.
A lot of words have been written, both here and elsewhere, about Cleveland State’s attendance issues and, more broadly, the apathy towards the school from locals. The school’s shaky finances add an extra layer of complexity to the discussion.
Regardless, it seems evident that most of the usual “big” answers, like winning a lot of games, aren’t much of a fix. The Vikings women’s team is in the middle of its most successful era ever, by just about any metric. The men’s team’s situation isn’t quite as clear cut, but at the very worst, the current run of success assembled by Gates and Daniyal Robinson rates comparably to the best periods of the tenures of Kevin Mackey or Gary Waters.
That certainly hasn’t mattered in either case, as anyone who has attended a recent game can attest.
Nor is it realistic to expect the students – often the backbone of any college team’s support – to ever make much of an impact, short of some fundamental shift in enrollment trends and recruitment strategy that doesn’t seem very likely. The budget situation vetoes any attempt to saturate the market with advertising, other than an Instagram ad here or there, or any significant changes to the Wolstein Center. Centralized events will bring out the usual not-large-enough collection of regulars, but that’s about it.
So why not try de-centralized events, meeting the potential audience where they are? That’s where Hoops & Scoops came in.
Going small isn’t the easiest way to build a brand. It requires tons of legwork from people throughout the organization, the return isn’t guaranteed, and the payoff, when it exists, is measured in rows, not sections. There’s a reason people generally try to throw money at situations, if that’s an option. But I’m living proof of the idea that seemingly-inconsequential interactions can lead to much larger outcomes.
And anyway, it seems apparent that Cleveland’s media and sports-consuming public will never grant the city’s Division I program the sort of status it awards to other universities located halfway across the state, or whatever is in Daryl Ruiter’s latest Jimmy Haslam-approved engagement bait post. So why not completely abandon that idea, at least for now, and lean into the benefits of being small?
For their part, the Vikings’ coaches and student-athletes executed that part fantastically well at Hoops & Scoops, arriving in significant numbers (it seemed like roughly half of the women’s basketball roster was present most of the time) and mingling with anyone who showed up. Men’s players patiently rebounded while kids fired errant shots at a toy hoop parked near the tent, while Chris Kielsmeier and Rob Summers circulated the patio to chat with people digging into cups of caramel fudge brownie.
That’s the sort of personal touch capable of fostering deep commitment and, through repetition and patience, eventually making a noticeable difference in more tangible ways, like donations and attendance.
Who knows, maybe it will even begin a chain reaction leading to a new writer on this website.
