wiu712 wrote:Games without a Pep Band are another problem. I don't know how other schools manage to have a band over the semester break ??? I was listening to the Women's BB game at IPFW on Friday night, and there was a band playing there.
For many schools in the conference, the majority of their students come from relatively close. If you look at the schools, most of them are located in a fairly large city:
Denver, Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, Fargo, Omaha, Tusla
The exceptions are South Dakota, South Dakota State, and ourselves. In the case of the SD schools, they're both within an hour of Sioux Falls and USD is within a half hour of Sioux City, IA.
I would bet that the majority of the students (and pep band members) for nearly every Summit League school come from within an hour of their school.
However, with Western, that isn't the case. The majority of our pep band members come from the Chicago area, suburbs, with a few from the QC area, Springfield, Peoria area, etc.
Asking students to drive 2-4 hours (or take a 3 hour train ride) to Macomb, to be paid $10, not be able to stay in dorms (so they'd have to stay in a hotel or something), then turn around and go right back home...it's just not going to happen. The only way that they'd be able to have enough people is if the school was paying closer to $100 for people to attend, plus opening up the dorms for students to stay the night in.
I've also attempted to get enough alumni interested to be able to put together a band of alumni and current members who might be able to come down for a game during break, but I've only ever been able to get 10-15 people interested for any specific date (at most), and that's probably half of what we'd need to sound at all decent.
Unfortunately, our location just kinda kills our ability to make something like this work.