Further investigation into the matter reveals interesting correlations between the number of fans at a game and the team’s performance. The team plays better when more people are there; it’s a fact. Being in attendance for every home game has also led me to believe that there are two main parts to the larger problem: not enough fans go to the games, and many of the fans that do go simply aren’t good fans.

Additionally, the Field House is vast, cavernous, and acoustically ill-suited for fans to get loud. Fans are also far from the ice, isolated and remote. In most rinks, folks walk down to their seats, which are right up against the glass. Here, we start in the wide walkway next to the glass, and head up. It’s also hard for the band to get into the game, since it is completely separated from the fans.

Solving the first of the aforementioned problems, however, will lessen the impact of the others. You know this if you’ve ever been to a Freakout! The more people are there, the louder it gets, and the players know it. After playing to a 5-3 Black Friday victory over hated Clarkson in front of 4,980 boisterous fans—not a sellout, but still a healthy number—Engineers scoring leader Kirk MacDonald offered the following opinion: “Guys were real jacked up to play tonight. It was awesome out there. The student section was unbelievable. They were really, really into the game and they were really behind us.”

The team was 3-0 this season when the attendance was over 4,000. When the crowd was under 3,000, the team went 5-7, and only one of those wins was against a conference opponent—cellar-dweller Yale.

Everyone stands to benefit from more fans showing up, and a quick look around just the ECACHL shows this. RPI sells out its Freakout! every year, and hasn’t lost in that game since 1990. Cornell sells out every game, and has historically won over 75 percent of its home games.

If more fans don’t show up, the fans that come need to get louder. Vocal cheers often aren’t together and don’t last very long. In addition, not enough people start them. If every cheer were as noisy and together as the post-goal cheers, we’d be in business. Again, a quick look around the conference demonstrates this. Cornell is the prime example of this; their cheers are clever, loud, and together. Clarkson, St. Lawrence, Dartmouth, and Vermont also have clusters of fans (mostly the student sections) that get into the game more than the fans here. Even Union, which gives free game tickets to students—with the average crowd at tiny Messa Rink can seem more invigorated than the crowds here.