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Traveling with Griz Basketball

By Beacon Staff

Nearly four months of traveling with the Grizzly football team can really spoil a guy.

How quickly you forget the luxury of charter flights on wide-body airplanes, more food than any one person can possibly consume in a 24-hour period and luggage and equipment loaded and unloaded by Steve Hackney and Rob Stack’s crew and available at your beck and call when one travels with the behemoths on the men’s basketball team.

The regional jets that fly out of Missoula International Airport are fit for the size of a cornerback, not for a basketball team whose coach is as big as his tallest players.

There’s no double-sandwich sack lunch and beverages waiting on your seat and, since just hours ago I made my way down what seemed to be a five-mile concourse at Denver International Airport to retrieve my luggage to climb into a rental car for the trip to Greeley, I can tell you there was no bus waiting conveniently for me on the tarmac as I deplaned.

Now don’t get me wrong, if I didn’t love traveling with the Grizzlies I sure would not be within six weeks or so of drawing my 25th year to a close.

But there is a huge difference between a 100-plus traveling party making its way to a game and the 17 or so of us who just made it to the hotel a few minutes ago at 10 p.m.

It is coaches and trainers driving rental cars. It is games played in gymnasiums suitable for little more than inter-murals and, even when it is played in a decent basketball venue, there’s often lack of crowd control, malfunctioning game clocks and other game management difficulties.

It is basketball operated on a budget where, at least in my opinion, athletes are not fed enough to keep their weight up during the gruel of a 25-30 game season.

Northern Colorado sold out against Sacramento and is expecting huge crowds for the remainder of its home season. Unfortunately, that is a few more than 2,800 fans.

In Missoula, of course, half of the team’s schedule is played during a time when there are no students on campus, which makes it challenging at best to present a boisterous home-court environment.

Yes this is Division I basketball – just like Grizzly football is D-I at the Football Championship Subdivision level – but attendance at both Griz and Lady Griz games continues to fall precipitously and the Big Sky Conference now has gone to a Friday-Saturday schedule it explains as a cost-saving measure.

Surely there are far more questions than there are reasonable explanations about declining interest and lack of attendance.

Are there just too many games and other winter activities? Is so much television coverage of collegiate basketball affecting the home team’s attendance? Is there a lack of real rivalry games in the Big Sky Conference? Are the games not exciting enough, or is the cost too high?

Or is it because a basketball team can have double-figure losses yet still enjoy a successful season, contend for the conference title and a subsequent trip to the NCAA tournament, which by the way they are talking about extending to 96 teams.

But that’s for another time.