The show is in the stands at Brock University
He was brand new on the job as head coach of the Brock University hockey team when he walked out onto the bench for the second game of the season. And realized he couldn’t hear himself talking to his players.
The Steel Blade Classic is the school’s annual showcase game at the Meridian Centre, the 5,000seat home of the OHL Niagara IceDogs. On this October evening, every seat was full and everybody in those seats was screaming, dancing and finding other ways to make a racket.
“I had not heard that kind of atmosphere in a game before,” Marty Williamson says.
He’s not just talking about university sports. He used to be the head coach of the IceDogs which played some big playoff games in that same rink. This experience, he says, was unique.
If that was a one-off, it would be still be impressive. But two months later, the student body filled the place again, this time for a basketball game. Last week it filled the off-campus SeymourHannah Centre for a hockey playoff game. And throughout the year, it showed up en masse for basketball and volleyball games at the school gym with their red shirts and increasingly hoarse voices.
“On a bad night we might be almost sold out,” says athletic director, Neil Lumsden.
McMaster, Mohawk and Redeemer have done great things building interest in collegiate sports around here. But if you’re looking for the hot spot for school fandom in southern Ontario, you’ve got to head about 45 minutes east of here.
Canadian university sports occasionally — often? — gets knocked for not being as big-time as American college athletics. But the truth is, the biggest difference isn’t always the athletes, it’s the atmosphere. Or lack of it. Yet, over the past couple years, Brock University has done its part to shake that while staking its claim to the title of Ontario’s most-enthusiastic fan base.
Lumsden believes it was the Steel Blade Classic a year before that really supercharged this change. But the groundwork had been laid a couple years before that.
As a graduate of the University of Ottawa, he remembers the Panda Games of his youth. Annual football grudge matches between the GeeGees and Carleton Ravens that routinely drew 20,000-plus. When he took the job early in 2016, that kind of thing was exactly what he wanted to replicate in St. Catharines.
Fortunately for the former GM of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, he already had the We Are Ready team on campus. Started by two students — and bolstered by former McMaster athletics marketing and communications head Robert Hilson, who had become Brock’s marketing and business development boss — this group had been working to create a culture that would improve the game experience better for other students and make going to a Badger game cool. Successfully, as it turns out.
“A couple years ago, the We Are Ready team won an OUA award for school spirit,” Lumsden says.
“We could probably be front and centre every year because I think we probably, with all due respect, do it better than anybody else when it comes to home games and our staging and engaging the student population.”
Critelli says things really took off when Lumsden arrived. Picking up on that culture change theme, the department set out to get students engaged which she says is the hardest part of the process. That Steel Blade Game a couple years ago was a massive hit. Having enjoyed themselves at a school game, many students decided to try another event. When they had fun there again and let others know, the crowds got bigger and bigger. And rowdier and rowdier. Lumsden says games are often now sold out a couple days ahead of time.
“It really is amazing,” he says. It helps that so many of the university’s teams are doing well this year. The men’s hockey team is playing in the Queen’s Cup final on Saturday (that game is expected to sellout), the men’s basketball team is in Halifax at the nationals, the wresting team won the national title (it’s fifth straight) and both curling teams won medals at the provincials. But Lumsden believes the school has now reached a point it isn’t essential to keep winning for students to come out.
“Once you’ve done it and the young people, the students, enjoy the environment, then it’s good to come back,” he says. “It’s a fun place to be.”