BroadwayVik
Active member
Next season, the Athletic Department (AD) selects a game that will be of a challenge but that which also Portland State is expected to win. This game is designated as the "Homecoming Game." Preseasonally, the AD makes a serious announcement that they want to make this game a break-through event of emotional significance for Portland State alums and student affecianados of the sport alike.
The goal: To bring to the new stadium the deafening roar reminiscent of past-glory D-II play-off games. The idea is to fill the stadium to the brim with PSU-partisan fans. If opposition fans are even allowed into the stadium, they are allowed but a vertical sliver section of designated seats, not quite the worst ones.
In order to do this, the AD will have to use every means at its disposal to get some 20,000 partisan PSU-fans into the seats. The stadium has to be sold out completely. The means to getting a full-house has to be relevant and salient enough to be talked about for weeks among the Portland populace prior to the approaching day of the event. What the salient incentivizing mechanism is needs to be determined through round-table discussion.
A $10.000 drawing prize (contingent on full-house attendance) may set the proper incentive threshold. But how high does it really need to be in order to be just as effective? For the sake of prompting discussion, I suggest that an excellent prize would be a package full of seasonal options that appeal directly to the heart of Portland Metropolitans. A four-seasons package for vouchers for things that most Portlanders would love to do but just cannot seem to justify the expense of doing so, these being true luxuries. A four-seasons combination would be something like (1) Autumnal Overhead Leaf-viewing Balloon Expedition, (2) Winter Hot Springs Week-end Getaway (to the snow country), (3) Springtime Mount Hood Dinner Train Excursion, and (4) Summer Starry-Night VIP Sternwheeler Cocktail Party and Dinner Rollout along the Willamette with an option for a Sun River extended week-end of enjoyment. Things of an upper-middle class taste.
The idea is for the community of the Portland State faithful to feel something again that has been virtually forgotten about for decades: the jet-engine-like roar of the stadium crowd during a Portland State game that is at least akin to that experienced during the 1980s D-II play-off glory game days under Coach Earnest Allen (when UO & OSU were not doing that well and PSU was the only game-in-town for which Portlanders to cheer). Parking became a real challenge then. Remember? People gladly parked their cars even up to the 18th Avenue tunnel up past the big Methodist Church.
There is now a whole generation of PSU students who have never experienced that feeling we have, nor heard a stadium roar that raucous, that thundering, that intense for a Portland State football team. That, then, is the goal: to have this new generation of Portland State faithful experience that full-volume feeling for the first time and for us to revisit that experience again. The emotional ramifications of such a planned outcome, I believe, would be sufficiently prodigous to even create desire among fans to have this megalophonic feeling persist as a natural right for their alma mater and university of choice and watch the Viking players feed off it. Katie Harman singing the National Anthem!
The goal: To bring to the new stadium the deafening roar reminiscent of past-glory D-II play-off games. The idea is to fill the stadium to the brim with PSU-partisan fans. If opposition fans are even allowed into the stadium, they are allowed but a vertical sliver section of designated seats, not quite the worst ones.
In order to do this, the AD will have to use every means at its disposal to get some 20,000 partisan PSU-fans into the seats. The stadium has to be sold out completely. The means to getting a full-house has to be relevant and salient enough to be talked about for weeks among the Portland populace prior to the approaching day of the event. What the salient incentivizing mechanism is needs to be determined through round-table discussion.
A $10.000 drawing prize (contingent on full-house attendance) may set the proper incentive threshold. But how high does it really need to be in order to be just as effective? For the sake of prompting discussion, I suggest that an excellent prize would be a package full of seasonal options that appeal directly to the heart of Portland Metropolitans. A four-seasons package for vouchers for things that most Portlanders would love to do but just cannot seem to justify the expense of doing so, these being true luxuries. A four-seasons combination would be something like (1) Autumnal Overhead Leaf-viewing Balloon Expedition, (2) Winter Hot Springs Week-end Getaway (to the snow country), (3) Springtime Mount Hood Dinner Train Excursion, and (4) Summer Starry-Night VIP Sternwheeler Cocktail Party and Dinner Rollout along the Willamette with an option for a Sun River extended week-end of enjoyment. Things of an upper-middle class taste.
The idea is for the community of the Portland State faithful to feel something again that has been virtually forgotten about for decades: the jet-engine-like roar of the stadium crowd during a Portland State game that is at least akin to that experienced during the 1980s D-II play-off glory game days under Coach Earnest Allen (when UO & OSU were not doing that well and PSU was the only game-in-town for which Portlanders to cheer). Parking became a real challenge then. Remember? People gladly parked their cars even up to the 18th Avenue tunnel up past the big Methodist Church.
There is now a whole generation of PSU students who have never experienced that feeling we have, nor heard a stadium roar that raucous, that thundering, that intense for a Portland State football team. That, then, is the goal: to have this new generation of Portland State faithful experience that full-volume feeling for the first time and for us to revisit that experience again. The emotional ramifications of such a planned outcome, I believe, would be sufficiently prodigous to even create desire among fans to have this megalophonic feeling persist as a natural right for their alma mater and university of choice and watch the Viking players feed off it. Katie Harman singing the National Anthem!
