Posted by Purple Pride on 10/10/2007, 9:05 am, in reply to "And lets kick UCLA while we are at it" When Purple Pride had it's heyday in the '04-'05 season - i.e. when I and my friends were in charge of it! Anyway... I digress. What aided us was that it was new, our team was decent (Pooh, Cooper, Donald Wilson), and the nights (Thursday/Saturday) were way better than the new Saturday/Monday. And from there it just grew organically. And honestly it didn't really matter who we were playing... most regular students who don't follow basketball don't really know the difference between Saint Mary's or Pepperdine or Portland State or UCSB or whatever. Sure, when Gonzaga, Oregon, and Oregon State come into town the students are more aware, but for the most part the key is getting the kids to just know that there is a game and have them want to come no matter who we are playing because they enjoy it. And I think Purple Pride had that for a while. But the problem was that it lasted for about one more year until it just totally fell apart last year under poor leadership and our student support sucked again. That's why the decision was made to try and formalize Purple Pride and help prevent it from being so cyclical. I don't mean to rebuke what you're saying, Ryan. What I mean to say is that if it can somehow crack into a winning formula (we totally lucked into it that one year) LL really can have it grow organically and take off and get good support for all the games. Of course, Purple Pride has a two whole courtside section across from the visitor's bench all to itself. If we didn't have that, we definitely wouldn't have taken off the way we did.
I've never been to a game at USF or SCU, so I can't really say either way what it's like down there, but I think I might tend to side with santa on this one. 
- once the momentum got going in the winter, we were definitely getting in the neighborhood of 250-300 or so for Thursday games and 400-500 or so for Saturday games during the WCC season - no matter who the opponent was. All it really took was for people to think it was "cool" ... I mean, honestly it's not like there's a whole lot else going on around campus. And I think that's true for any small private school, no matter where it is located. Sure there is a lot of stuff going on in Portland on a Saturday night, but how many kids actually even venture off of campus? Not that many... most just go to house parties on the weekend. Am I wrong in assuming that's the case at Santa Clara, LMU, USF, San Diego, etc. as well?91
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