If you’re looking to get the most out of your dollars this college basketball season, Coastal Carolina University might have the deal for you.
The public university in the Myrtle Beach area is promoting what it calls the “We Win, You Win, Money Back Guarantee” to sell season tickets for its men’s and women’s basketball teams. If someone buys a season ticket package for either team by Nov. 3 and both teams win 35 games combined in the 2024-25 season, they will get a full refund of the season ticket price.
More from Sportico.com
The Chanticleers are coming off tough seasons, so this year’s promo is far from a shoo-in. In 2023-24, the men’s team finished 9-22 overall and next-to-last in the 14-team Sun Belt Conference with a 5-13 conference record. The women finished 12-21 overall with the same conference record.
But Chance Miller, the school’s VP for intercollegiate athletics and university recreation, was excited about the new coaches that took over both teams after watching practices all summer, including when the men’s squad travelled to Greece. During that time, Miller and the staff were trying to come up with different ways to build support for Chanticleer hoops, especially for two teams with mild expectations coming out of the Sun Belt.
“I think it started July 15, and we sat down with the staff and said we have three goals that we’re going to focus on while we’re here,” Miller said in a phone interview. “It’s going to be the student-athlete development and well-being, revenue generation and the fan experience. And when we looked at the basketball program, the thing that was really lacking was the fan experience. We just don’t have enough bodies coming out.”
While the full refund plan was not borrowed from anywhere else, Miller said he’s used discounting before when he was the senior deputy athletic director at South Carolina. Dawn Staley has built the nation’s best women’s program, yet the men had not enjoyed the same glowing profile. Lamont Paris was hired as the men’s hoops coach in 2022, and Miller figured out a way to lure fans to watch a moribund basketball program in the early weeks of the season.
In 2022-23, the Gamecocks offered free concessions for the month of December, whether the fan was a season ticket-holder or bought a single-game ticket. The promotion was a success, and Miller duplicated it for 2023-24. “The past year, when we did the promotion, we tripled, and in one game, quadrupled our attendance,” he said. “And then they really got to see that, ‘Oh, (Paris) got a good team. They were winning.’ It created great atmosphere, and when they got to conference play in January, they started selling out the arena.”
The HTC Center is nowhere as large as the 18,000-seat Colonial Life Arena on South Carolina’s campus, but Miller believes that an up-and-coming men’s or women’s team (if not both) can make it a tough place for visitors, if fans show up .
“It’s not huge, but if you pack that thing, it’s a great atmosphere,” he said. “It’s loud. People are right on top of you on the visiting team, and it’d be an intimidating place to play.”
The men were picked to finish 13th in the preseason coaches’ poll for the Sun Belt Conference, only ahead of Louisiana-Monroe. The women fare better at ninth in their respective poll, with sophomore forward Alancia Ramsey named a preseason All-Sun Belt Third-Team selection.
Coastal Carolina has had great success in other sports. Dustin Johnson was an All-American golfer before he joined the PGA Tour, and the school continues to produce multiple athletes who have gone on to MLB and the NFL. Yet past leadership did not place the same level of investment in basketball as it had in their more prolific sports, according to Miller.
Coastal Carolina had an athletics budget of $45.6 million in 2022-23, the last full academic year of publicly available data via Sportico’s college sports finance database. Though the budget is less than $5 million under the average in the Sun Belt, it’s less than half of the national average at $100.7 million.
“I don’t know if the time has been there, and that’s nobody’s fault,” Miller said. “It’s just that there were different priorities that people had prioritized and invested in, and now I think basketball is one we need to invest in … If a team makes a run in March Madness, it puts your institution in a different spotlight, and people get excited. Look at the teams that have made a run in the past, whether it be VCU or Butler or FAU. Recently, San Diego State making a run. You can talk to those institutions, and I know their applications for admission went up because of that.
“And so, really want to invest in both programs, and that’s why we did this promotion. It wasn’t just to sell tickets but also to draw attention (to the fact) that we’re investing in men to women’s basketball here at Coastal.”
Best of Sportico.com
Sign up for Sportico’s Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
