Long Beach State athletics dealing with the home-field disadvantage

When a team has home-field advantage and the home fans don’t show up to watch, is it really considered an “advantage?”

With a 2-1 win over UC Santa Barbara last Friday, the Long Beach State women’s soccer team secured the No. 1 seed in the Big West, ensuring that it will play host to opponents throughout the conference tournament. The thing is, you could play these matches in Stockton and it really wouldn’t make a difference.

For their 10 home dates this season, the 49er soccer team has drawn a little more than 363 fans in attendance, far short of filling the 1,000-seat capacity George Allen Field. In comparison, LBSU opponents have drawn an average of 459 fans per match.

Now, if this was a doormat team at the bottom of the conference standings, those numbers would be explainable, but for a squad that sits in first place in the conference standings, that’s just plain inexcusable.

We’ve got a team that is a constant threat to crack the nation’s Top 25 rankings and is on the verge of earning its first NCAA tournament bid in the program’s short existence. Not to mention that the team has outscored opponents 37-13 this season, so you know there’s going to be ample goal opportunities. So the question is, what’s keeping you away from the bleachers?

Now, there are exceptions such as men’s water polo that draw crowds larger than the 49er Campus Pool’s limited space can hold, and for that, I commend the fans that do show up. However, that support does not run across the board.

On a campus of 35,000-plus students, we’re only asking for slightly over 2.8 percent of the student body to fill George Allen Field to capacity — maybe even less when you consider the athletes’ parents sitting in the crowd. We only need 12 percent of the student population to fill the 4,200-seat Walter Pyramid.

Speaking of the Pyramid, it appears that even having gold-medalist Misty May-Treanor in attendance can’t bring students out to the volleyball games. Despite being dubbed “Volleyball U.,” the women’s volleyball team has been unable to draw crowds close to half of capacity.

The highest attended match this season, against UC Davis, where members of the undefeated 1998 National Championship team — featuring May-Treanor and silver-medalist Tayyiba Haneef-Park — was honored, managed to pull in about 1,694 spectators. How can arguably the most impressive feat in NCAA history go unnoticed by the campus population?

I’m not expecting LBSU students to sing our school’s fight song in unison at sporting events anytime soon (how many students even know the words to our fight song?). I’m not expecting you to get so passionate about the games that you’ll curse at the refs, throw foreign objects in his/her direction and risk getting banned from future events.

Maybe it is natural for a campus of commuters to be lacking in school spirit. I do not expect this campus to be de-commuterized overnight, but a movement’s got to start somewhere. You may be disgruntled that the college football bowl season is around the corner, and our 49ers — undefeated since 1991 — are not in the mix, but we do have teams on campus — notably, the women’s teams — that kick ass.

Head coach Mauricio Ingrassia and his senior-class have raised the soccer program to respectability over the past four seasons. They’ve won three conference regular season titles, but have been bounced in the first round the previous three seasons.

So when the conference tournament kicks off Thursday at George Allen Field, pack up the bleachers or bring your lawn chairs. Let’s help our seniors win that NCAA tourney bid that has long eluded them.