Diamond Addendum

The transition between the outline of the last post and the written word left off a very important point that applies to both the baseball and soft squads at UT Arlington. I initially thought I'd add the info into its own comment below the post, but there's a lot to it and its deserving of its own blog entry.

With the struggles the two teams have experienced the last few years, especially since they downgraded conferences from an RPI perspective, there has been a very notable metric that suffered this year, reversing a decade climb.

In 2024, the baseball team averaged 378 fans, the third straight decline in attendance, discounting the COVID year where every game drew 314 in the box score. It was the lowest since 2014's 352. Their time in the Sun Belt was generally positive for fans in the seats, nearly doubling the totals the team saw while in the Southland Conference. The highest year was 618 spectators per game in 2017. 2019 saw 591 and 2020 drew 606 fans before COVID cancelled the remainder of the schedule. 

Not coincidentally, 2020 was the last winning record. 2023 ended in a .500 year. 

Starting with the last two years in the Southland, here's UTA's attendance average per year, record and conference record:

SLC

2011 - 437 (27-29, 15-18)

2012 - 336 (36-25, 19-14, NCAA Tourney participant)

WAC

2013 - 331 (31-27, 18-9, WAC co-champs)

SBC

2014 - 352 (33-26, 19-11)

2015 - 432 (24-32, 14-16)

2016 - 512 (30-28, 15-15)

2017 - 618 (30-25, 20-10, West Division champs)

2018 - 486 (22-35, 11-19)

2019 - 591 (32-26, 17-12)

2020 - 606 (12-4, 0-0)

2021 - 314 (27-30, 13-11)

2022 - 493 (15-39, 7-23)

WAC

2023 - 406 (29-29, 16-14)

2024 - 376 (22-34, 16-14)

As a note, the NCAA lists UTA's numbers at 408 (spreadsheet can be found within their website here), but included in that was the Texas Tech game at Globe Life Field. That is a neutral field game to me and I have always excluded games at the Texas Rangers home in my tallies.

Softball's numbers show a similar trajectory to the baseball numbers, with a couple of deviations. This year, they drew 246 to Allan Saxe Field, the lowest since the 217 per game average of 2017.

Softball's all-time high was 467 fans in the COVID shortened year of 2020. Bucking the baseball trend, the Mav softballers averaged 417 last year, despite the losing record. The schedule was good for drawing fans than the 22-29 record. Texas Tech (425, 713), Texas-Austin (810) and Baylor (569) all came to the Saxe. Only Tulsa (648, 451), Kansas City (492) and Rider (504) drew a large amount for a non-name team.

I'll spare you the chart I did for baseball, but generally speaking, UTA averaged in the 100's while in the SLC and first year in the WAC. They drew in the 100's once in the Sun Belt, in the 200's three times, 300's three times and 400's once. There was also the COVID year where every game was 156. Of the 200's it was at the beginning of UTA's time in the SBC, meaning they grew as the time went on. Will 2024 be a blip or the start of a downtrend?

Keeping the similarities alive, softball hasn't seen a winning record since 2019, the year they won the NISC. They didn't have the conference success in the SBC that baseball did but had a stretch of four winning seasons in five attempts. The last three years were sub-.500. Five years of losing seasons is now catching up.

While neither baseball nor softball have been close to drawing fans to the point where the financials have a large, direct impact on the money invested in the programs, they do both show the interest in the teams as well as show how they are doing. For most of the 2010's, they, like much of the rest of the Athletic Department, were growing and competing. That needs to right itself for the diamond sports.