Given I was planning a driving trip from WI to New Orleans for the Sugar Bowl over New Year's weekend, I had to work in some Mission 351 college basketball stops along the way. The original plan was to hit a Mississippi/Mississippi State doubleheader on the way down, but some travel delays meant that was no longer feasible so a backup plan was hatched that included a minor detour through Alabama instead of Mississippi. Fortunately, Alabama St. University had a non-D1 game canceled earlier in the month and chose to add a December 29 matchup with non-D1 Lane College to their schedule.
Crazily, this December 29 game served as Alabama St.'s home opener as they put together a pretty typical SWAC non-conference schedule of exclusively road games to replenish the athletic department coffers from Power 5 school buy games. As I always mention, I strongly dislike attending non-D1 matchups and with this being the third straight campus non-D1 matchup, I wasn't thrilled to attend, but finding SWAC home games to attend before January are few and far between. Unsurprisingly, this game was sparsely attended to the point that tickets weren't even being sold to the game; the school just let anyone come in who wanted to watch the game. As such, there wasn't much of an atmosphere given there was no student section, no band, and no cheerleaders to hype up the minor crowd. Thankfully, the PA announcer was pretty darn into the game to at least provide some energy into the building.
The Dunn-Oliver Acadome itself is pretty old and not terribly well maintained, but if you got a crowd of a few thousand into the building, I think the environment would be pretty good. The sightlines seem pretty good from anywhere in the building and the seats are pretty severely sloped to where even sitting halfway up in the seating bowl, I felt pretty close to the action. Unfortunately, the on-court action in this contest wasn't that great either. Even with Alabama St. coming into this game with only 1 win on the season, it was pretty clear the Division II squad from Lane College was overmatched. I'll give Lane credit that they played hard all afternoon and even made a bit of a push early in the second half cutting a double digit halftime deficit down to 4 point, but Alabama St. pulled away once again to lead fairly comfortably before I had to leave to make sure I had enough time to make Game 2 of the day from the University of Alabama-Birmingham.
No comments:
Post a Comment