Humber athletes need better support, recognition

OPINION

Nicholas Prencipe: Sports Writer

The Humber Hawks sports teams and athletes are consistently ranked very high in their categorized standings, but the support for these teams is extremely low.

From attending and reporting on a few games this season, the crowd and atmosphere were quite lacklustre.

In the men’s and women’s back-to-back soccer games, I saw more fans for the opposing teams than for Humber.

And these were home games.

Humber’s Sports Information and Marketing Coordinator Brian

Lepp says he’s noticing a lack of supporters.

“If you come to a basketball game, there is a lot of [promotion] there,” Lepp said. “It’s loud, fun, and the environment is great, but outside of that, there’s not a lot.”

Humber’s gym at maximum capacity is about 1,400 people, yet most games aren’t even half full.

This underwhelming turnout of home support is not an uncommon experience in sports.

However, it rarely occurs for teams who are extremely talented and headed in the right direction for a championship, like our teams are every single season.

Humber Athletics won more national championships than any other Canadian college, a record eight gold medals, along with twenty-three CCAA Academic all-Canadian student-athletes.

Sporting Director Ray Chateau even won the 2023 OCAA Administrator of the Year.

The turnout for many Humber teams is way below the level of talent they possess.

This is likely due to the promotion of each team, or rather the lack thereof.

A walk through the school will reveal that, aside from the athletics section, there are no other places on campus with Humber sports advertisements.

Even including the athletics department, there’s less than a handful of promotional pieces for Humber’s home games.

One of the promotional pieces is on the bottom of the second set of doors entering the athletics building, which has the home schedule for men’s and women’s soccer, baseball, softball, and rugby. With the quality Humber athletes possess, it seems like a serious error to not focus more on promoting

their games to attract new fans.

Even though not everyone is a sports fan, you will never find so many different groups of people supporting the same team anywhere else.

Promoting the teams the way they deserve and support from fans will follow the upward direction.