AACC students said in April the reason they don’t attend sporting events here is because they don’t live on campus.

In an informal poll of 20 students on campus, 12 said they don’t come back for evening games after they have already gone home; if AACC had dorms, they said, they might stick around for them.

In addition, five students either said they don’t go to games because the sports teams don’t interact with the student body or because AACC isn’t a Division 1 school. Three said they skip the games because the teams aren’t successful.

“It’s a community college,” Douglas Hatch, a first-year biology major, said. “People drive back and forth. I have to drive 30 minutes back and forth and [it] isn’t worth coming back for.”
AACC has 11 sports teams, including Men’s and Women’s Basketball, Lacrosse and Soccer; Baseball and Softball; Women’s Volleyball and Cross Country; and Men’s Golf.

The average attendance at outside events ranges from 35 to 100 people, while indoor events such as the basketball games bring in 75 to 100 people, according to Zach Malone, sports information specialist at AACC.

“People just come here to get work done” and leave after their classes are over, first-year information systems major Shelby Waltman said.

But others said attendance is so low is because the teams don’t promote their events, so a lot of students don’t know when the games are. Plus, some students said they don’t like going to games when the teams are not winning.

“Community college sports aren’t advertised like Division 1 sports are,” Neeko Vanzant, a third-year psychology major, said. “There’s no school spirit here.”

The result, Shaquille Worrell, a second-year mass communications major, said, is that “students don’t care.”