We moved to Nashville in November 2020, and when the Symphony came back from the Covid shutdown we bought season tickets. In November 2021 we went to a concert where two young soloists joined the orchestra. Aalia Hanif played flute and Bernard Ekwuazi played trombone. They were so immersed, and as they filled the hall with their music, they sounded every bit as professional as the orchestra behind them.
Both had come up through the Nashville Symphony’s program called Accelerando. That was the first we heard of it. Aalia was by then at Northwestern and Bernard at our own Indiana University.[1]
The Symphony calls Accelerando “an intensive music education program” for gifted young students, built to prepare them for music in college and beyond. Its musicians give the students lessons, mentoring and chances to perform, and help them apply to music schools. When the program launched in 2016, the Symphony said it was meant for young musicians from diverse backgrounds.[1]
Our season tickets also came with free seats at the current students’ spring recital, an early evening concert on the Symphony’s own stage. We had the time and the program sounded interesting, so in June 2022 we went.[1] The students were 13 to 18 years old, and we were blown away by how good they were.
We were even more amazed by the empty hall. Parents, a few friends and a small number of symphony regulars could hardly give those kids the joy a fuller house would have.
Afterward my wife, Leslie, and I agreed we would have paid for that performance, and it would have been a great concert at the price. Watching young people play well beyond what you expect at their age is a joy to be celebrated.
Those students deserved an audience, and their playing deserved a hearing. They are also the best example a community could have to draw bigger audiences and more talent to the classics.
Leslie said she would call the people at the Symphony. That hall should have been full. The next day she called, and she offered to volunteer with the program.
Leslie later started building an alumni program for Accelerando, and through it she came to know all the students. Many of those students are heading toward professional roles in symphonies around the country.
The same empty seats, a few miles away
My daughter graduated from Belmont University here in Nashville, and so did my son-in-law, so my wife and I started doing what parents do. We bought basketball season tickets, extra ones too, first for our kids. I am also an Indiana University alum, so I knew what it felt like to belong to a place where college sports carried real weight. The energy, the traditions, the sense of being part of something larger than yourself.
Belmont surprised me. Here was a university with about 9,000 students, tickets that were free for students and cheap for everyone else, and an arena smaller than the student body.[2] Its men’s and women’s basketball teams have each won at least 20 games for 11 straight seasons. Belmont says it is “the only school in the nation” to do that in both.[2] By every rational measure those stands should have been full. They were more than half-empty.
At first I assumed it was a Belmont quirk. Then I started asking around, and I learned that crowds at men’s college basketball games have slipped across the country over the last decade, even as the women’s game has grown.[3] The puzzle would not leave me alone, so I went looking for why, and what I found changed how I think about what holds a community together.
We care about more than the sport
Here is what I did not expect. The game is only part of the reason people care about college sports.
People enjoy good basketball, sure. But that is not the only reason someone drives through snow to a game, or wears the colors, or feels genuine sadness when the team loses. The research on why humans care about sports points to more than the game. We care because a team is a vehicle for identity and belonging, and belonging is a basic human need.[4][5]
When you support a team, you are saying you are part of this community, and when the team succeeds, you feel that you succeed too.
Psychologist Robert Cialdini and his colleagues have a name for it. They call it basking in reflected glory. They measured the matching tendency to distance yourself from a loss, which later researchers named cutting off reflected failure.[5] Your image, in the eyes of the people around you, rides on the team.
That is not irrational. For most of human history, belonging to a group could be the difference between surviving and not, and that likely left deep marks on how we are built.[4]
College sports give that ancient drive a harmless modern channel, a way to feel pride in a shared achievement with the people you go with, season after season, and to take part in a ritual with a whole crowd of other people.
But the belonging pays out most when you actually show up, with other people.
Empty seats may compound
Sitting in those half-empty stands, I realized that an empty seat is a missed habit as much as a missed night.
I would bet the patterns a student sets in the first year tend to hold for the next three. A freshman who never goes to a game seems unlikely to start as a junior, and a freshman who goes a few times and enjoys it has a reason to keep going. If that is right, low attendance in year one carries into every season after.
As far back as 2014, athletic directors worried that students who skip games grow into alumni with a weaker tie to the place that educated them.[6]
Streaming may have made this worse.[6] You would think more access would help, but when you can watch from your dorm in your pajamas, the small friction of getting dressed and walking across campus starts to feel like a lot.
The convenient option quietly substitutes for the better one. And it is the better one. Alone on a screen you have a private experience you can pause and leave. In a crowd you have a shared experience that happens once and never exactly that way again. That shared quality is a big part of the point.
Attendance is a signal of institutional health
I chair the Baruch College Fund Campaign Committee, and I have spent years around institutional fundraising, so I notice what separates the schools that thrive from the ones that struggle. One of the clearest dividers is whether the place has a living community culture, and athletics is one of its most visible forms. It works through emotion.
Gallup has found six college experiences, three about support and three about hands-on learning, that raise the odds a graduate feels attached to the school, and attached alumni appear more likely to give.[7] I believe good nights in the arena can build that kind of attachment.
Big donors feel it too. From what I have seen, the thing that moves a major gift is rarely the budget line. It is the gut sense that the institution is alive and that your support matters. A packed arena delivers that feeling in a way a brochure never will.
A prospective family that visits and sees energy and tradition can read the school as thriving. A family that sees empty stands may read the opposite. Attendance is a signal, and I believe it shapes recruitment, reputation, and money.
I watched this at Indiana, as a student and in the years since as an alum. The basketball tradition never felt separate from the school’s academic reputation or its alumni loyalty. It was woven into them.
At Belmont I see all the same ingredients sitting there, ready. It is like having everything you need for a great meal and no one sitting down to eat.
What I learned watching my wife
I had seen Leslie bring people together before, and watching her is how I learned what actually works.
When we first got to Abu Dhabi, she and the wife of one of my colleagues found they shared the same trouble. It was hard to get connected, and hard to find the simple answers a spouse needs in a new place, about our children’s school and about life in the city.
Historically, many spouses and their families left soon after arriving. The language and culture were so different, the working spouse was busy with a new job, and they couldn’t find connections or a community.
What’s the best place to shop for American brands? How do you get permission to buy alcohol? How do you sign up for internet? These are the simple things in life that take time to learn, and a veteran can give you the insider’s view. So they built a simple fix, a buddy program.
Before new families arrived, the program paired them with matching families, with children of similar ages and a variety of other things in common. All the questions you would have before moving to a new place now had somewhere to go. And when the family landed, someone was there to greet them and introduce them to life there and to the school.
We took on buddy families ourselves. We met them as soon as we could after they arrived, and Leslie took them around, introduced them to other people and showed them the shops they needed. As far as we could see, more families stayed, and parents and kids got off to a much better start than a cold arrival gives them.
She joined the school’s board and spent years building community, raising money and making connections. She started an alumni program there too, connecting the students in school with the ones who had graduated. During Covid, its virtual reunions were a way to stay connected in an uncertain world. She now serves on the school’s education foundation board.
Then we came to Nashville. We are Hoosiers, so we joined the local Indiana alumni group, which hosted watch parties for the promising basketball team and a few football games. We would have three or four others show up.
Leslie decided to tackle this head on. She got on LinkedIn and Instagram and reached out to people one at a time, with a personal note inviting them to the watch parties. When they came, they knew her, and they often returned.
The first person to come because of her notes walked over and said, “Hi, Leslie,” as if she already knew her, and thanked her for reaching out. She had thought about coming before but never got past that stage until Leslie’s message landed.
Attendance has grown since, in some cases to hundreds. Indiana’s winning football team helped a lot more than the outreach did. But people come back when they meet and know someone familiar.
For those of us who are older and prefer a less boisterous room, we sometimes add a second location, and engagement goes up. The group now has a life of its own, and a momentum that should be more sustainable.
Look at what those stories share. A family landed in a new country, and someone was expecting them. A stranger walked into a watch party in Nashville, and someone was expecting them. None of it started in a marketing office. It started with someone who cared enough to reach out. In the end, the part we control turned out to be almost embarrassingly simple.
None of us can make a team win, and winning alone doesn’t fill a building. Belmont’s men went 26-6 last season and drew about 2,000 a game to a 5,000-seat arena.[2] Of the things we can do to fill seats, I have come to think the most effective is to invite people personally, by name, and be there looking for them.
One study on persuasion, by Mahdi Roghanizad and Vanessa Bohns, points part of the way. Students who asked other students they did not know to fill out a survey got far more yeses in person than by email.[8] That suggests a note is the weaker ask, even one sent to one person at a time.
Leslie couldn’t knock on doors across Nashville, so she wrote anyway, and some of those notes landed. I think an invitation like that goes further than a flyer because it does what a flyer cannot. It obliges a little, vouches for the night, supplies a companion, and makes going feel normal.
A poster generates awareness. A person generates a yes.
So the people best placed to change attendance are not in the marketing office. They are the faculty member, the resident advisor, the returning student, the alum, the board member and the neighbor, anyone willing to ask.
The ask is not heavy. Pick a game, invite three to five people by name, and go with them. You only have to care enough about community to ask, whether or not you love the sport.
This is bigger than Belmont
If you are an alum of any school, this is yours too. Your alma mater’s teams carry your institution’s name whether you followed sports there or not, and showing up keeps your tie to the place alive, which is exactly the tie that makes you proud of your degree decades later.
And if you have no team at all, because you did not go to college, or you live too far from your school to see its games, I would offer one suggestion. Find a local college team and make it yours. It does not have to be a powerhouse.
Go to a few games, learn the team’s story, get to know the regulars. Over a season you will have built something real, a small community and a set of rituals that root you to a place. That is worth the most to the people who have just moved somewhere new and are trying to belong.
We kept our extra Belmont tickets when our kids moved. Leslie wants seats we can give to people we invite. And it’s working. Several of our Indiana alumni friends have now come to Belmont basketball. One couple signed up for season tickets of their own. We sit next to each other at the games.
Who the seats are for
Go back to that recital. Kids of 13 to 18 played on the Symphony’s own stage to a nearly empty hall. Our seats were free. A Belmont student’s seat is free too.[2] A free seat is not an invitation.
A kid on that stage and a kid on the Belmont team are doing the same thing. In the moment they are putting everything they have into the universe, for us to enjoy. That moment happens once. Whoever stays home loses it, and never knows what they lost.
Community is about showing up for the people giving everything they have, even when their talent is not ours.
Nashville calls itself Music City, and Belmont is known for its music. Its School of Music counts more than 400 performances a year, and its arena is attached to its music business school.[9] Apart from the pep band, I doubt many music students think to walk over to a game, and I doubt many players think to go to a recital. All of them would be better for a fuller house.
I hope that changes. I would love to see a Belmont cellist in the stands and a Belmont point guard at a recital. And maybe the music teachers in the schools around Nashville ought to invite their students to a recital like the one we saw that June, or to a game, to celebrate the others in front of them.
Think of what that would do for those students, for this community, and in some small way for our world.
To me this feels like a strangely isolated time, wired to everyone and close to no one. The plain act of gathering with a crowd around something that matters is worth more in a time like this, not less.
I am a parent who noticed some empty seats, an alum who remembers what community felt like, and a campaign committee chair who knows what keeps an institution healthy. Leslie is the one who picked up the phone.
The thing I keep landing on is unglamorous and within anyone’s reach. Show up. Invite a few people. One game, one recital, one invitation at a time is how a community actually gets built.
The practical version of this argument, a play any campus can run this season, is in the companion piece, Fill the Seats at Belmont Women’s Basketball, coming Tuesday.
Reference Sources
- Nashville Symphony, “Accelerando”, on the program’s instruction, mentorship and help applying to music schools, and “Accelerando Program Returns with Full Enrollment of 24 Students”, August 31, 2020, on its teachers and mentors from the orchestra. The Symphony’s August 2016 announcement of the program’s first class describes it as meant for gifted young musicians from diverse backgrounds and names Hanif and Ekwuazi among them. On their later study, see the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s biography of Hanif and the Nashville Symphony’s biography of Ekwuazi. The Symphony’s season announcement of May 19, 2021 lists both as Accelerando alumni soloing with the orchestra on November 4-6, 2021, and its concert page names both as the soloists. The student recital is the Accelerando Spring Recital of June 6, 2022, at 6:30 pm.
- Belmont University, “Student Enrollment” (total headcount 8,975 for 2026) and “Curb Event Center” (5,000 permanent seats). Students get in free with their Belmont ID (“Curb Event Center Gameday Guidelines”, Belmont Athletics), and in January 2025 a season ticket covering every women’s and men’s home game was on sale for $199 (Belmont Athletics, January 31, 2025). 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 only school in the nation” is Belmont’s own wording (Belmont Athletics, November 1, 2026). Belmont names the six other programs whose women have the same streak: UConn, South Carolina, Baylor, Iowa, NC State and South Dakota State. Each of their men’s teams fell short of 20 wins at least once in those 11 seasons (UConn, South Carolina, Baylor, Iowa, NC State, South Dakota State, Sports-Reference). The closest is Gonzaga, whose men won at least 20 every season and whose women went 19-14 in 2015-16. I found no other independent source for the claim.
- 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 Division I, where Belmont plays, home crowds averaged 4,231 for men and 1,770 for women in 2025-26.
- Baumeister, Roy F., and Mark R. Leary. “The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation.” Psychological Bulletin, vol. 117, no. 3, 1995, pp. 497-529, doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497. The link is a course copy hosted at Wabash College.
- 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.”
- New, Jake. “Empty Seats Now, Fewer Donors Later?” Inside Higher Ed, September 10, 2014. On student attendance at college football games. The article also notes that a link between athletics and alumni giving “has been debated for decades,” and that more recent research argues for a connection especially in football and in gifts to athletic programs rather than to a university’s general fund.
- Lohnes, Blake, and Nader Nekvasil. “Alumni Attachment, Giving Linked to Undergraduate Experience.” Gallup, September 1, 2016.
- 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.
- Belmont University, “School of Music”, on more than 400 performances a year. “Can Belmont Break Through?” Sports Illustrated, March 15, 2012, on the arena attached to the music business school. Belmont Vision, “As Belmont’s postseason begins, the Bruin Blast Pep Band is still playing,” March 3, 2022.