Give us numbers we can count on
at • ten • dance n. 1. The act of attending. 2. The person or number of persons that are present. 3. The frequency with which a person is present.
— The American Heritage College Dictionary
By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Staff Columnist
One is a lonely number, two is company and three is a crowd, but some people at the University of Hawai'i are apparently still unclear on what an attendance is.
There is the dictionary definition of attendance, there is what common sense tells you and then there is the new UH version.
At the Warriors' football game Saturday night, the "attendance" was announced as 39,616 at Aloha Stadium, where there were clearly fewer people than that.
Sunday night at the Rainbow Wahine's volleyball match, the crowd was announced as 6,830 when there looked to be more like 5,500 in the Stan Sheriff Center.
Exactly how many were in the house each night is unknown because UH has so far refused to divulge the figures. Presumably loose lips sink more than ships.
For nearly 20 years, dating to Stan Sheriff's stay as athletic director, it had been UH policy to announce both the actual turnstile count and the number of tickets distributed, just as a number of professional sports and many colleges do.
But recently the school has announced only the number of tickets distributed, a total that includes all tickets whether anybody uses them. As such it is a figure that can cast doubt on the school's credibility when the numbers say one thing and the eyeballs say another.
I mean, when you ask somebody who went to an event what the crowd was, they'll say "about 28,000." Nobody says, "There were about 28,000 tickets distributed."
Ostensibly the change in policies was made at UH so the school can have higher numbers to point to for various reasons, including recruiting. That's a curious decision considering UH volleyball is the annual national leader while football and most other sports are already at or near the top of the Western Athletic Conference, hardly the kind of programs that need to fudge numbers to make themselves look respectable.
If UH is willing to play with those numbers, you wonder what else is subject to change. And, the timing is curious since the movement is toward turnstile figures. The NCAA has mandated that, beginning in 2004, it will accept only actual bodies in the seats for the 15,000 average in football necessary to maintain Division I-A status.
Meanwhile, if UH is so concerned about projecting better attendance numbers for some of its sports, perhaps it needs to look at the attractiveness of some of its opponents.
Perhaps it is scheduling, not the accounting practices, that needs to change.
Correction: Major League Baseball boxscores list the game's turnstile count and the capacity of the stadium. A previous version of this column was incorrect.
