Jim Purdy | Guest Contributor

For almost 20 years now, I’ve been a supporter of Western Oregon sports, with season tickets to volleyball, basketball (men and women) and football. But, I never attended this school.

I actually graduated from a Division I school which won three national titles in football alone. They also put teams in the NCAA basketball tournament and managed to get into multiple elite-eights, final fours, plus numerous college world series. Interestingly enough, that same Division I school enrolled fewer undergraduates than Western during my time there, and still managed to field solid athletic teams in spite of being a pure-engineering school. Back then, you couldn’t get a degree other than a BS, MS or PhD, and there were no liberal arts schools because everybody had to take calculus, chemistry and physics.

So, how did they pull off this feat? Simple. They used the big three philosophy: recruit student athletes (equal emphasis on studies and athletics), employ motivating and skilled coaches and rally the fan base to every stinking game. It works, folks. 5,000 undergrad students and three national football titles!

Western can get there too. Western’s men’s basketball team made it to the title game just a couple of years ago, but it takes all three to prove once was not a fluke.

Western’s volleyball team has solid student athletes, perhaps the best class at every skill position in at least five years. Coach Tommy Gott seems to have them sufficiently motivated, and undoubtedly will produce winning teams in another year or so. For the volleyball home opener, the statistics sheet showed attendance of 850 at the match. For games one and two, I suspect there were 750 Western fans and perhaps 100 Northwest Nazarene fans. The vast majority of the Western fans were students. That’s a great start on that big three philosophy — talented student-athletes, solid coaching and great fan support.

For those first two games of the match, the fan support buoyed the Western team to an amazing set of victories. These were actually easy victories, considering Northwest Nazarene was undefeated and Western was barely 50-50 on the season.

I sat on Western’s side of the old gym for those two games and would attest to the solid fan support. It was loud and boisterous. I moved to the other side of the court for the third game because Wolfie, the mascot who stands about 6’-6” tall and whose head is almost half as wide as he/she is tall, insisted on standing right in front of my seat for most of the two games. From the other side of the court, I could see all of the game, but also noticed a steady stream of fans leaving the student section.

I suspect half of the student fan base never saw the amazing way Northwest Nazarene, and their uber-involved coach, took control of that pivotal third game. With the score 16-10 in Western’s favor, Nazarene’s coach called his second and final time-out. That time-out didn’t seem to stop the point-bleeding for Nazarene, but it was critical nonetheless.  

Western fans continued to stream out. It was as if there was some kind of curfew looming at around 8:30 p.m. and nobody wanted to get caught in the old gym. The critical mass of fan support for Western vaporized and Nazarene stepped up their play a notch. A corner was turned, and the entire momentum of the game shifted. A few minutes later the Nazarene coach stepped up his critique of the officiating and the scorekeeping, and I still don’t understand how the score changed — but it did. Nazarene won that game, and turned the rest of the games into a match-winning nightmare for Western.

The match, which should have ended much earlier than it did at something close to 25-20 for Western in a deciding third game in an amazing 3-0 shut-out, lasted far too long in a narrow Nazarene victory at three games to two. Western actually had more points, 70.5 to 69, and posted three double-digit-kill-players to only two for Nazarene. In short, and on paper, they played better than Nazarene and still lost the match.

By the time the end of the fourth game came for Western, there were probably as many Nazarene fans as there were Western fans and most of the student section had abandoned their team for something else.  

In the tie-breaking fifth game, the Nazarene fan base was vocally superior to Western’s and that may have been a significant contributing factor to Western’s loss. After all, they had Nazarene on the rope well past the midpoint in that third and potentially deciding game, but still Western managed to lose momentum and ultimately lose the match.

Gott will eventually learn how to work the courtside official like that Nazarene coach. A good coach is like a seventh player who can’t actually touch the ball when it’s in play, but can affect the game at critical moments. Nazarene’s coach certainly earned his coaching salary in that pivotal third game. He kept up the coaching pressure in the fourth and fifth games as well.

Western’s student fan base has some distance to go. To paraphrase a favorite old poetic piece, “they have miles to go before they sleep.” They need to stay for the whole game if Western is going to challenge in the GNAC.

When the fan base was there and vocally supporting the Western players, the Western players responded. In fact, they dominated the other team. When the fan volume diminished, it was like the “extra” player they needed for that domination just left the game.

Fans don’t actually win games, and neither do coaches. Student athletes win games — but fans and coaches can be significant contributors to a loss.

Gott will quickly grow into a fine coach, and a winning coach who works right up to the end no matter if it’s a win or a loss.

I wonder if Western’s student fan base can do the same. My twenty years of watching Western’s athletes do their thing suggests they might need to stick around and support their team right up to the end, no matter if it’s a win or a loss.

Contact the editor at journaleditor@wou.edu to publish a response.