If your school has a good team playing to quiet stands, this is for you. Belmont University in Nashville, my daughter’s school, is one of those places. I think there’s a way to fill those seats that any school can run, so I wrote it as a letter you can copy. The letter is to Belmont. After it, I lay out why I think it works and how to send your own.
To the faculty, staff, students and neighbors of Belmont University,
My wife, Leslie, and I hold season tickets to Belmont basketball. Our daughter graduated from Belmont, and so did our son-in-law. We bought extra seats for them and kept the seats when they moved.
You have a lot to be proud of. Your men’s and women’s teams have each won at least 20 games for 11 straight seasons. Students get in free. Students are a five-minute walk away. The people who run game day work hard to get the word out.
And yet the stands are more than half-empty, and the women’s games are the emptier of the two. Last season the women went 20-12 and drew about 1,200 a game to a 5,000-seat arena.[1]
I am writing to ask for one evening.
On Tuesday, November 17, at 6:30, the Tennessee Lady Volunteers are at the Curb. Please come, and please don’t come alone.
If you teach or work at Belmont, invite three to five students by name. Not a mass email. A real ask. Then go, and sit with them.
If you are a student, say yes the first time someone asks. Better, do the asking. Grab two friends. If you are a freshman, this may be the year it counts most.
If you coach, advise, or lead a team or an office, make it a group outing. A lab, a dorm floor, a department, a club.
If you run athletics or student life, thank you for all you already do. One more idea: give faculty and resident advisors an easy way to claim a block of seats and bring students with them.
If you live nearby or went to Belmont, buy an extra seat or two and give them away by name. Leslie and I do this.
Picture a junior on that floor. She carries a hard major, practices two or three hours a day, and has prepared for this game. When the lights come on, she will notice whether the rows are full or sparse.
A full, loud house tells her, and every recruit and visiting family, that this place values its athletes. You can send that message for the price of one evening and one invitation.
Leslie and I will be there. Come find us.
With gratitude,
Leon Shivamber
Nashville, November 2026
The case behind the letter
A letter has room for one ask. Here is why I think it is the right one, and why I put the women’s team first.
What one seat does
It does two things, and both are bigger than entertainment.
The first is for the player. The road to the WNBA is narrow, with only about 180 regular roster spots in the whole league.[2] The junior in the letter is not playing for a pro contract. She plays because she loves the game and wants to represent her school well.
A crowd can change how athletes play. The research on home advantage in pro basketball is consistent, though most of it is on the NBA. In the NBA, a home crowd tends to lift a team’s effort, even as a big crowd adds some pressure. One study comparing men’s and women’s leagues in Spain found a smaller home edge for the women.[3] Coaches call it home court for a reason. When you stay away, you hold back something that could have helped the people on the floor.
The second is for the program. I believe athletic directors and coaches read attendance as a measure of demand, and that the number shapes how money and attention get spent.
There is a backdrop worth naming plainly. Women are about 43 percent of NCAA sports participants today. TV sports news gave women’s sports nowhere near that share, at least as of 2019. In a study of Los Angeles TV sports news and ESPN’s SportsCenter, repeated every five years since 1989, Cheryl Cooky, Michael Messner and colleagues found that women’s sports drew about 5 percent of airtime in its 2019 round, with little change over 30 years.[4]
I think that gap feeds a cycle. Less coverage, less recognition, fewer sponsorships, thinner budgets, a lesser experience, and then less coverage again. You do not have to make this gap a cause to pull one lever an ordinary person actually controls.
The surge of interest in women’s basketball in recent years showed up in the stands too. The average NCAA women’s crowd across all divisions hit a record 861 a game in 2023-24. In Division I, the home average last season was 1,770 a game, a number lifted by the biggest programs. Belmont’s women drew 1,202.[5]
A seat is a vote that decision-makers count. In the emptier building, each one counts for more. That is why the letter starts with the women’s team.
Why an invitation, not a poster
The people who run Belmont’s games are good at what they do. Posters, emails and posts let people know a game is on, and that matters. But in my experience, knowing about a game rarely gets someone out the door on its own. That last step takes a person.
I learned that watching Leslie. Our Indiana alumni watch parties here in Nashville drew three or four others until she started writing to people one at a time. A winning football team helped a lot more than her notes did, but people come back when they know someone there. My companion essay, The Empty Seat, tells that story.
One study on persuasion, by Mahdi Roghanizad and Vanessa Bohns, points part of the way. People who asked strangers in person got far more yeses than people who sent the same request by email.[6] So where you can, make the ask in person.
I think an ask from a real person beats any flyer because it does four things a flyer cannot. It creates a small obligation. It tells you someone you respect thinks this is worth doing. It hands you a companion so you are not walking in alone. And it makes the whole thing feel normal instead of strange.
No office can invite every student by name. That is why the letter asks faculty, staff and team leaders to do it. The poster tells people about the game. The person brings them to it.
The timing matters most early, because I would bet a student’s first year tends to set the habits for the next three. A freshman who has a good first night has a reason to come back. The first game is the hard one, and it can start a four-year pattern.
Send your own
I keep saying Belmont because Belmont is my family’s school and the empty seats are the ones I have actually sat in. Nothing in the play depends on Belmont. There is no special sauce.
The play is four steps, and any campus can run them:
- Find the people with standing. Faculty, resident advisors, coaches, club leaders, respected upperclassmen. Anyone whose invitation carries weight.
- Give them one specific game and an easy way to claim a few seats.
- Ask them to invite a small group by name and go with them.
- Aim at first-year students first, because their habits are probably still forming.
Copy the letter above. Swap in Indiana, where I went, or your own school, and pick a game. Then send it, and go sit with the people you invited.
Reference Sources
- Belmont University, “Curb Event Center” (5,000 permanent seats). Students get in free with their Belmont ID (“Curb Event Center Gameday Guidelines”, Belmont Athletics). In 2025-26 the women went 20-12 and the men 26-6, and home crowds averaged 1,202 for the women and 2,013 for the men (women’s statistics, men’s statistics, Belmont Athletics). In every season from 2015-16 through 2025-26, both teams won at least 20 games (men, women, Sports-Reference). The 2026-27 women’s schedule lists Tennessee at the Curb on November 17 at 6:30 p.m.
- WNBA, “WNBA And WNBPA Reach Tentative Deal on Historic CBA”, March 20, 2026, and CBS Sports, “WNBA, players union announce details of historic CBA”. Teams must carry a full roster of 12 players, plus two developmental spots, and the league lists 15 teams for 2026. The 180 regular roster spots are computed from those figures, 15 teams times 12 players.
- Leota, Josh, et al. “Home Is Where the Hustle Is: The Influence of Crowds on Effort and Home Advantage in the National Basketball Association.” Journal of Sports Sciences, vol. 40, no. 20, 2022, pp. 2343-2352, doi.org/10.1080/02640414.2022.2154933. Reviewed with other studies in Mochales Cuesta, Ignacio, et al. “The Influence of Home-Court Advantage in Elite Basketball: A Systematic Review.” Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology, vol. 9, no. 4, 2024, article 192. The review found little research on women’s basketball. One study it covers, of men’s and women’s top-division games in Spain from 2010-11 to 2022-23, found a smaller home advantage for the women.
- Cooky, Cheryl, LaToya D. Council, Maria A. Mears, and Michael A. Messner. “One and Done: The Long Eclipse of Women’s Televised Sports, 1989–2019.” Communication & Sport, vol. 9, no. 3, 2021, pp. 347-371, doi.org/10.1177/21674795211003524. Summarized by USC Today, “News media keeps pressing the mute button on women’s sports coverage”, March 24, 2021: women’s sports drew 5.1 percent of local TV sports news and 5.4 percent of SportsCenter airtime in 2019. The participation share is computed from NCAA figures for 2024-25: 242,341 women in championship and emerging sports (“Women’s Sports Reach Record NCAA Participation,” NCAA, March 1, 2026) out of 554,298 athletes in championship sports and 6,992 in emerging sports (“A record number of NCAA student-athletes participated in 2024-25,” NCAA, September 15, 2025), about 43 percent.
- NCAA, “Men’s Basketball Attendance Records” and “Women’s Basketball Attendance Records”, through 2025-26. Across all divisions, the men’s average crowd fell from 2,168 a game in 2015-16 to 1,890 in 2025-26, while the women’s rose from 773 to 848. The women’s record, 861 a game, came in 2023-24. The women’s average has dipped in each of the two seasons since, to 857 and then 848. In 2025-26 the Division I home average was 1,770 a game, and Belmont’s women averaged 1,202 over 15 home games. The 50 programs with the highest home averages drew about half of all Division I home attendance that season (4,842,436 of 9,653,546).
- Roghanizad, M. Mahdi, and Vanessa K. Bohns. “Ask in Person: You’re Less Persuasive Than You Think Over Email.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 69, 2017, pp. 223-226. Summarized by the University of Waterloo, “A Face-to-Face Request Is 34 Times More Successful than an Email,” June 13, 2017. The 34-times figure comes from the first of the paper’s two studies, in which students asked other students they did not know to fill out a survey. The emails in that study went out one at a time, from the requesters’ own university accounts. The authors’ open copy is on Cornell eCommons.
Further reading: Cialdini, Robert B., et al. “Basking in Reflected Glory: Three (Football) Field Studies.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 34, no. 3, 1976, pp. 366-375, doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.34.3.366. The link is a course copy hosted at the University of British Columbia. Foundational research on how fans tie team outcomes to their own image, including the matching tendency to distance from a loss. Snyder, C. R., MaryAnne Lassegard, and Carol E. Ford. “Distancing After Group Success and Failure: Basking in Reflected Glory and Cutting Off Reflected Failure.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 51, no. 2, 1986, pp. 382-388. This later paper named that distancing “cutting off reflected failure.”
The broad case for why college sports matter, and the community and institutional-health argument behind this letter, is in the companion piece, The Empty Seat.