Arena #173: Dunn-Oliver Acadome - Alabama St. vs. Lane College

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.

Arena #169: F.G. Clark Center - Southern vs. Prairie View A&M

For my second game on Saturday, I drove across town in Baton Rouge to visit Arena #169, the F.G. Clark Center on the campus of Southern University, for a Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC) matchup between the Southern Jaguars and the top team in the conference, the Prairie View A&M Panthers.  This was my first-ever visit to a SWAC conference school and my first-ever SWAC conference contest, meaning I’ve been to a game at a school in all but 2 of the NCAA Division 1 conferences (America East and Northeast remain).  The F.G. Clark Center was a pretty non-descript building from the outside and my thoughts didn’t improve much upon getting inside.  The arena holds probably 8,000 people, but, on this day, the entire upper level was roped off and even the lower bowl was probably no more than 3/4 full for Senior Day.  Honestly, this was probably a good thing though as even with the smaller crowd on hand, the concourses were cramped to navigate around and there was only 1 concession stand open for the entire crowd, which made that section of the concourse almost impossible to navigate through.

I came into this game expecting it to be fairly competitive given this was a matchup of the top two teams in the conference, but honestly I was most excited to see and hear the band performances throughout the game knowing how well known and honored HBCU bands are.  I will say the band lived up to my expectations, and was probably the highlight of my visit by far, but the game was certainly a bit of a disappointment even though it was quite competitive.  The quality of the on-court action was honestly not very good and lead to some very inconsistent action that had very little flow.  Fouls piled up on both teams through the game and led to the game taking forever to play.  As I still had to head back to New Orleans for the evening, and the game had already crossed the 2-hour mark, I chose to leave the game with about 5 minutes left and Southern up 7 points.  It would turn out that the game would ultimately go to overtime, but Southern would pull out a 9-point win.

Outside of the F.G. Clark Center at Southern University

View of the multipurpose seating area of the F.G. Clark Center

Opening tip for some SWAC action between Southern and Prairie View A&M

The famous Southern University band jamming out during a media timeout