This past fall, 3,265 students attended all fall sporting events. From this total, 2,254 were brought in by football games. The reason for the lack of students attending the six other teams’ events is promotion and student engagement.

Social media plays a big role in high school sporting events, especially in the promotion of smaller sports that don’t get much recognition. It is multiple clubs’ and departments’ jobs to help spread the word that there are games coming up throughout the week or month. But, it seems to be big sports like football and basketball getting the most attention by these accounts.

The SHS Athletic department runs an Instagram, Twitter and Facebook account. Their Instagram is mainly used for game day posts and end scores, Twitter is used for updates and Facebook is used to post quarterly updates. 

However, their social media could be improved upon quite a bit. One way to do this is to appeal to students more by using story posts to show student life at games and encouraging more students coming to smaller sporting events.

The Booster Club’s goal is to “boost,” and they falter in that section. The main sports they post about are basketball and football, and if any other sports are mentioned, they are announced the day of the event. How does this help students to want to attend games?

When students see posts of events made the day of, they are automatically less likely to go since they may have to work that night or have already made plans. If students knew what games were going on throughout the week, they would have more time to plan their schedule in order to support their school.

More students would go to the games with more notice, and a weekly schedule of games would be a great way to help students and even families support their teams. 

But school organizations aren’t the only problem. It’s not only the lack of promotion, but the lack of students wanting to go to games. The events students go to are based solely on what other students are already going to, and these games tend to be the basketball and football games. 

If students were pushed more to go to track meets or wrestling matches, school spirit would be up and smaller teams would feel more supported. Girls soccer brought in 88 people this past fall. That is less than a third of the school’s total number of students. 

One way the township has tried to bring more students to games is making admission free. Somehow though, this did not change the attendance. So, even though the athletic department and the township as a whole is pushing for students to get out to games, it seemingly has not been working due to a lack of student involvement.

Some ways we can bring the number of students attending smaller games up is by doing daily announcements, posting schedules at the beginning of the week and making themes for all sporting events, not just football and basketball games. 

As a school, we need to do better in growing our limited support of lesser-known sports. We need to come together to come up with ways to get out to sporting events to support our friends and our school.