Hawks Nest not a draw at Carver

[FRANAMANIAC]

The cloth roof doesn't help any with acoustics

 

[Klondike53226]

And for the big donors who come here and wonder how dare anyone suggest moving them a bit off the floor since they paid for those seats in order to make room for the students, how do storied programs like Michigan State, North Carolina, Duke, etc., get away with it? You'll still get good seats -- behind students who are making CHA a more attractive and supportive place for Iowa teams to play.

There are issues associated with this, primarily the likelihood that moving the students in front of the donors will require them to leave seats without use, because students are likely to stand all game, whereas older fans will not. Value City Arena in Columbus moved their students from the end to behind the bench, and then had to leave several hundred seats unsold so the students could stand without obstructing those behind them. Value City Arena is a much larger facility than Carver-Hawkeye Arena, so it is easier to do in a place like that.

 

[bws258]

Hawks Nest is completely lame ... they had a great opportunity to make it better during CHA renovations, and they neglected to do so

 

[tweeterhawk]

Hawks Nest is completely lame ... they had a great opportunity to make it better during CHA renovations, and they neglected to do so

I would agree but now is not the time for finger-pointing or assigning blame, but rather looking ahead to how to engage more students and make their presence more visible to help a rising program.

 

[Hawkize]

Steve Alford bought pizza for us when I was in college. Maybe Fran should buy pizza.

 

[Billso]

All good ideas. I agree with the notion of including some athletics charge in the student activity fee to cover the cost of attending major athletic event (mainly football and men's basketball) and then letting students get in free, but there may be an issue of requiring all students to pay for something that only a fraction of them benefit from. (This was an issue 35 years ago with a student activity fee subsidy of the Daily Iowan.)

CHA, unfortunately, was designed for fat-azz farmers/donors and not a vocal student body. It didn't need to be at the time it was built; years ago, believe it or not, a ticket to men's hoops at CHA was hard to get. I don't know whether a redesign would allow closing off aisles near the floor or putting in bleacher seating behind the benches and in view of the TV cameras for students. I'm not sure Barry Garta would even be interested in exploring that. But the fact is students are not packed in close to the floor; you get little sense from TV that there's even a student body attending other than shouts of "Byrd, you suck!" amid screeches of players' shoes on the hardwood and the occasional shot of the kid wearing the farmer outfit or the teletubbies.

Those would be huge steps forward. But the university also needs to be aggressive in encouraging that sort of effort through marketing, organization, tschotckes, meeting with coaches and players. People in the Hawks Nest need to feel like they are a part of something special, something that gives them a benefit that non-members don't get. Even if it's getting the chance to walk through a special Hawks Nest/boosters ticket entrance with a gold rug at CHA.

Yup. This "internet" thing is intriguing, but if the sports marketing department all got internets, I understand their identities would be stolen immediately...

Extending seats across every other aisle in the first several rows seems a great idea. There may be a fire code reason that's not possible, however; I dimly recall that Carver's emergency design requires the lower half of the bowl to exit at floor level. However, under the suggested plan, the lower rows would still be very short so I'm not sure this would be a material hindrance. After all, there's already blockage from the scorer's table, team seats etc.

The weirdest thing for me watching current games is not seeing any floor seats behind the baskets. Those were packed in the 80's. Changed for safety?

As for donors, in most places the best viewing for basketball is up around rows 8-10 anyway. Put the students low on one side; put the donors on the other side, and call the higher donor rows "club seats" with some extra privileges. Something hundreds of other arenas have done successfully.