Senator Proposes an End to Football
In order to find out why Trinity students did not attend games, I looked to Lynn Kahle’s functional model of fan attendance in which she explains that attendance at college games is influenced by internalization, camaraderie, and self-expression (Kahle, 1996). In Kahle’s model, camaraderie has two components: compliance, and obligation. Compliance represents an individual’s desire to comply with what the fan community is doing, and obligation is the effect to which an individual feels obligated to the team, community, or themselves to attend the game. Kahle’s self-expression influence also has two components - identification with a win and self-definition – through which fans either see themselves as a part of the win or they see their participation or attendance helps define themselves and their fandom. Unfortunately, it seems that Trinity students simply don’t have the camaraderie necessary to cultivate strong fan attendance,because students felt no obligation to the football team and there was no established community to comply.
As I’ve found through researching the grassroots efforts Trinity students made to increase attendance at football games, some folks can, in fact, get “enough” football. Simply put, there was great apathy towards the mediocre football team of the 1980’s, and the growing apathy towards football increased at the beginning of the 1980s, as evident in an article written by Dorian Martin in a November edition of the 1980 Trinitonian. The article explained that a student government senator proposed a plan to cut both the football and baseball programs in order to provide a few scholarships to strengthen the basketball team. However, the senator that proposed this plan, Pete Andarsio, admittedly used the interview and the Trinitonian article to conjure up student support and force action at the upcoming student senate meeting (Benson, 1980).
This action by Senator Andarsio makes me question the validity of the student opinion emanating from the Trinitonian, and something I must keep in mind. Although I must question the validity of football actually getting the cut from Trinity, it clearly seemed like a possibility to the students if there was such a significant response. However, only those who felt obligated to show support at Senator Andarsio’s forum showed up, and conversely, the Trinity community did not feel any obligation or sense of responsibility in attending football games. Students, having no duty to the sports programs, were not attending games. This is evident by a letter to the editor of The Trinitonian written by Trinity Alumni Tom McNeely BS 1962 entitled “Athletics support means attendance,” where McNeely recounts his experiences returning to Trinity for varsity home games only to be met with empty stands. After Senator Andarsio’s forum in subsequent Trinitonian articles, President Calgaard is paraphrased in the February 22, 1980 edition of The Trinitonian, that his judgment of the future of individual sports programs would be based on three criteria: (1) the number of participants the sport attracts (2) whether or not the school can be reasonably competitive in the sport and (3) student interest in the sport besides those who participate in it. Students now knew what it would take to keep the sports they enjoyed.