Sidney Speaks

09-10 Basketball47

Asking for some forgiveness from you guys as I have been down for the count sick the last couple of days. Was feeling guilty about not updating the blog, so wanted to quickly throw a couple of interviews with Coach Lowe up for your review.

Dave Glenn interviews Sidney and Coach Lowe does an excellent job of avoiding the minefield and baiting that DG tried. No more about that.

Second interview Coach Lowe talks about fan support and other very interesting items..

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09-10 Basketball

47 Responses to Sidney Speaks

  1. jbpackfan 12/11/2009 at 11:08 AM #

    ^The students have the sideline and endzone seats- I think 2500 of their 3500 are in the lower level. The students just aren’t really filling them.

  2. boonami 12/11/2009 at 11:14 AM #

    As to the kind of person Lowe is, he recently bought a house from my co-worker, when my buddy was moving to California. Now my buddy/co-worker grew-up in So Cal, doesn’t care about ACC bball so there is no bias in his opinion of Sid. I asked him what was like and he said Sid is one of the nicest people you’ll know with no pretense or arrogance. It was good to hear he isn’t some kind of phony as I gather the “Huckleberry Hound” is at unx.

  3. PackMan97 12/11/2009 at 12:06 PM #

    I don’t know why folks think we’ll magically fill up Reynolds. The last few seasons we played there we were lucky to get over 10k on average and during the Les years there were plenty of games where Reynolds was half full.

    Attendance is more of a factor of the product on the floor the past few years than anything else.

    Win and the fans will come, lose and they won’t. It’s that simple. It has nothing to do with Reynolds or with the RBC Center. The RBC can be just as loud as Reynolds when the crowd is excited into the game. Maybe y’all don’t remember losing to scrub teams in Reynolds during Les/Herb….you could hear a pin drop in there the crowd was so dead. No excitement, no winning, no noise.

  4. PoppaJohn 12/11/2009 at 12:20 PM #

    I may regret this, but I have to go against the grain here and say I like the RBC Center. I am proud to walk up to, and into, an NC State first class facility. I like hearing the TV guys and some of the other coaches admire the building.

    Perhaps there is some shuffling of the seating that should happen to accomodate the less attended games, and maybe there are other ways to improve the experience (better intro), louder, but the good news is we have a really nice building – let’s just fine tune it to be great.
    And fielding a consistent, winning team with players that people are excited to see will make most of these issues seem small.

    Have you guys been to Reynolds lately? I haven’t been in a few years, but the last time I was there it was an armpit. I loved it in its day, I watched Dave Thompson there when I lived in Owen Dorm, I watched a ton of games there since, but it’s 50 years old! (The best part was the noise, and the bogus noise meter, it could get deafening in there.)

    The ideal would have been an ‘RBC like’ facility on campus, but that’s really hard to do with a campus like ours. I’ll bet they tried to figure it out.

    In this case I say, rather than take the ‘fire somebody and start over’ (aka “move back to Reynolds”) attitude which is pretty common with us (me included), I say we start with the ‘great building, let’s improve the experience in order to become a more scary place to play’ attitude. We aren’t moving, so let’s make a pretty good thing even better.

  5. Ed89 12/11/2009 at 1:03 PM #

    I’ll have to agree with you, PoppaJohn, except for Reynolds being an armpit. I still think it is an historic building that is a great basketball venue. For 4-5 games per year, I think it would be great, but overall RBC is our home, and we need to look for ways to improve the experience.

  6. KChill 12/11/2009 at 1:16 PM #

    I prefer watching a game at the RBC to Reynolds, it’s just a nicer place. That being said, we’re suffering about 4 -5 L’s a year where a rowdier home court would prob make the difference. The money that we gain from extra ticket sales is inferior to the millions more that we’d get from being a nationally respected team (eg., Duke’s program making more than ours), and it’s especially doable now that we’re post-Les Robinson talent. So my preferred solution is to build another arena on campus – about 12K seats with better design and better facilities than Reynolds.

    However, if we’re going to stay in the RBC, we have to make it a rowdy place again. We need to do like the MTV Awards when handing out student tickets, and say – hey these are free, but only to those who are going to scream and cheer their heads off the entire game. There should also be a dedicated section for those who pledge to show up for EVERY game, not just ACC games. Finally, we need to make the companies who buy blocks of seats in the RBC DONATE them to schoolkids if they’re not going to be occupied for a particular game….what else?

  7. packpowerfan 12/11/2009 at 1:28 PM #

    Another thing that needs to be done is to reconfigure student ticketing (AGAIN). My buddy and I noticed this for the UNO game, but he requested a ticket at the beginning of the request period, and received an upper deck seat (in the 300s). Now, as a senior who is at nearly every game, he has loyalty points near the maximum. I, who wasn’t sure if I’d be able to attend, claimed a “leftover” ticket at 2 am THE MORNING OF THE GAME, and I got a ticket about 10 rows from the court. This has to change, hands down. Luckily, the normally strict RBC Nazis were really accommodating in moving people closer to the court. He even let my buddy move to sit down in the normal student section, because “there just weren’t enough students close enough to make it fun”.

  8. VaWolf82 12/11/2009 at 1:48 PM #

    That being said, we’re suffering about 4 -5 L’s a year where a rowdier home court would prob make the difference.

    I call BS.

  9. Alpha Wolf 12/11/2009 at 2:01 PM #

    Thing is, I have been in the RBCC for basketball when the place was absolutely roaring. Almost at playoff hockey level even.

    The building is designed to be frakkin’ loud. Look up at the ceiling, those white panels are made to reflect sound downwards and they have NO sound absorbent on them. Go to a place designed for quiet acoustics and you will see that sort of thing all over the place…but RBCC doesn’t have them. They have the opposite.

    When it is filled to the rafters with motivated fans, RBCC can seem like sticking your head in a jet engine. Anyone who went through the 2002 and 2006 Stanley Cup runs can tell you that. Reasons are many why it isn’t that way all of the time, but blaming the building is just plain wrong. It has been measured as one of the five loudest rooms in North America for sporting events. It’s just up to us to make it that way for NC State hoops.

  10. newt 12/11/2009 at 2:07 PM #

    I meant that the seats near the floor, where the students sit, should be closer to the edge of the court. There is a vacant space between the court and the front-row seats. I have been told there are fire considerations, but there are also “guest seats” in front of the aisle that could be filled with student bleachers. Additionally, the hockey wall creates a barrier between the crowd and the court. It should be removeable.

  11. packpowerfan 12/11/2009 at 2:22 PM #

    Dead on Alpha. I’ve read that Game 7 of the Stanley Cup registered the loudest decibel reading for any sports event. Of course, it’s unofficial.

  12. wolfbuff 12/11/2009 at 2:28 PM #

    I think one of the problems with the RBC is that the team never looks comfortable there. And that’s probably because they don’t practice there. I’ve heard the “spacious” arguments that it throws off their shot. It would be better if they practiced there. As for noise and attendance, I agree that winning would put all that to rest. While I agree a more stacked arena of 15K – 17K would be more ideal, it’s not so no sense in haranguing about it. To get butts in seats, the university should have an electronic ticketing system that requires season ticket holders to go to a portal and download/print their tickets for each game within a certain number of days of the game. If they don’t offer them for 75% of face value to the public. That way, the university gets to sell the tickets more than once. And they increase the likelihood of getting people in there to buy concessions at inflated prices and more parking revenue (also inflated). They should also have a policy of getting to seats by a certain time of the game, or seats will be open for others to move into. If you get there too late, you’re on your own. As for students, bus them to the arena. Rent or buy a bunch of buses and make it easy for the students to shuttle over (maybe they already do that, I don’t know).

  13. newt 12/11/2009 at 2:51 PM #

    “They should also have a policy of getting to seats by a certain time of the game, or seats will be open for others to move into. If you get there too late, you’re on your own.”

    They can’t do that, but they could have a policy that a person is free to sit in an empty seat until that ticketholder arrives to claim it.

  14. Ed89 12/11/2009 at 2:54 PM #

    The whole argument about the spaciousness throwing off their shot is “poo” IMO. Anyone who saw us play VT two years ago knows that. We couldn’t miss. Shooting is about confidence. The more we win, the more confident we will become. That argument would be best for a team like Syracuse in the Carrier Dome. They’ve had some great 3 point shooters. However, come to think of it, maybe that’s one reason they play alot of zone. 🙂

    Anyway, I do think it would be nice for the team to practice there 10-12 times a year, but again, I don’t think the size of the arena affects their shot.

    Wolfbuff, I do like some of your other ideas concerning getting butts in the lower level seats.

  15. newt 12/11/2009 at 3:21 PM #

    Anyway, it sounds like Sidney has a totally different relationship with his team this year. He has always said in so many words that he recruits work ethic, that work ethic is a talent, and that you either have it or you don’t, and that it cannot be taught or coached in. That philosophy seems to be presenting itself in this years’ team so far in a team that has a lot of work ethic coming from within.

  16. Moose Hunter 12/11/2009 at 3:40 PM #

    You folks bitching about the RBC center just don’t know what you’re talking about. I had season tickets in Reynolds, and a frickn’ headache after every game from watching it over my left shoulder as our seats were deep along the sidelines upstairs. Reynolds atmosphere was great, but MANY of the seats sucked. I also have lower level RBC season tickets since the building opened, and those of you complaining about the building are way off. You must have missed the NIT games there under herbie where the place was so loud, you literally couldn’t hear yourself talk! It was SMSU, I think. West virginia too. Place was one of the loudest in the country. it was and still can be, incredible. Now, our current atmosphere is weak, but blame losing seasons and crappy basketball, not the RBC center.

  17. bradleyb123 12/11/2009 at 4:17 PM #

    All I know is I remember some conference games in Reynolds that were so loud, I had to plug my fingers into my ears a few times to avoid hearing loss. And I was a college kid that could handle loud music as good as anybody. I remember a double-OT game against GT that was so loud I thought my ears would bleed. Of course, we ended up losing that game, despite the noise.

    I have yet to hear that kind of noise in the RBC center. Although I admit I don’t go to many hockey games. If someone thinks that Stanley Cup 7th game was as loud as any other sporting event, I contend if you put those people in Reynolds (well, as many as you could fit), it would have been hearing-loss kind of loud.

    It’s true that we just need a winner of a team to get people to make more noise. And actually showing up for games would help, too. But I find it hard to believe the RBC can be louder than the Old Barn in it’s heyday.

    I don’t know if the noise in Reynolds would help us get more wins or not. I think it could make a difference in a close game, though.

  18. 61Packer 12/11/2009 at 9:47 PM #

    I don’t believe for a minute that the RBC is louder than Reynolds, not when we can’t even fill up the RBC lower level anymore for our games. There are many of us who attended games in Reynolds, going back to the Case years, and I can guarantee you we’ve never had an RBC crowd yet that could approach the noise levels in the Barn.

    Sure, more fans have better seats in the RBC, but have we traded team advantage for fan comfort? I’d like to know how much, if any, our teams get to practice on the same floor on which they play. When we were in Reynolds, we had an air of confidence even when underdogs. It was OUR floor. Now, we’ve become tenants in our “home” fuh-cility, often playing like scared rabbits.

    We may get better in basketball, but until we get our teams out of a cavernous hockey arena and into a smaller and more cozy campus basketball facility, don’t look for or expect a return to greatness.

    It absolutely will never happen as long as we have Lee Fowler and the Carolina Hurricanes in town.

  19. bradleyb123 12/12/2009 at 12:32 PM #

    61Packer, I agree with every word. But I’ll add a thought to it… if we already had a great team right now, the RBC probably would be rockin’ and rollin’ during games. But we don’t (not yet anyway). A loud arena would probably help the team, and if the team improved, that would probably help the noise level in the RBC. It’s kind of a “catch-22”, or a which came first, the chicken or the egg.

    I’d like us to play in Reynolds until we had a great team. (Not saying Reynolds would MAKE us a great team, but just play there until we HAVE a great team…) Then possibly move to the RBC Center if we must.

  20. VaWolf82 12/12/2009 at 12:37 PM #

    And what do you propose to tell season ticket holders, LTR holders, and the people that leased suites when you unveil your grand plan to move back to Reynods?

    …Opinion without consequences is the lunatic fringer’s divine right…

    Bob Lee

  21. bradleyb123 12/12/2009 at 1:02 PM #

    It was a wish, VaWolf. I didn’t say it was feasible, or could, or should happen. I just wish we were back in Reynolds again.

    Wise crack removed by me. No need to sink to the level of a few others.

  22. TOB4PREZ 12/13/2009 at 10:41 AM #

    Alpha speaks the truth…. tRBC during the NHL playoffs is deafening…. I’ve been fortunate enough to visit many venues and I wasn’t aware it had been recognized nationally for its decibel level….but, I’m hardly surprised by it. If we could have that place sound like that for just half of our ACC home games (4)… I’d be thrilled, and floored. Having said that…. within the next year or two, I fully expect to have nearly all of our home league games sound like playoff hockey. Pack basketball cometh.

    GO PACK!

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