Welcome!

Welcome to our forum, Greg!

Hey Greg first thing do not feel like you are an outsider. Uc davis is a very welcoming place as are all Aggies fans. I realize Oklahoma is very different from California ( i had many clients in OK when I was practicing law) but davis is a pretty cool little town. You will feel welcome here. I spent many a nice day in Stillwater and it felt a lot like davis for me. Even got my hair cut there and it was excellent!

welcome aboard Greg.

Welcome Greg! You’ll get great (free) advice here, lol. Free giveaways are always popular, such as the student bike giveaways at football games this season, and free T shirts are always nice. But on a bigger scope, our student base these days has a large contingent of international students. Football and basketball may not have been part of their culture. Educating the students about these sports regarding how fun it is to attend and when do you cheer, when do you make noise, and when should you be quiet. How about recognizing a group of students who are attending their first football game? Give them a free shirt to wear and recognize them during the game.

Bring back the wrestling program, and start a new women's team!

@MTBAggie:
Being an Oklahoma State guy, I'm all about wrestling, but afraid I have little say in that matter.

@AggieFinn2
I'm going to meet you at least halfway here. I've already elevated baseball, softball, and wbb up to the same levels at least in terms of spent time resources as football and mbb. All of the other sports are at least getting better guidance now than they were, but it's going to take a little time. WSOC has been killing it in the spring, just need everyone else to follow suit.

UCD also went all-in on Instagram at the expense of other social platforms and communications outlets, I'm slowly getting that reversed.

Thanks, everyone else for the advice, always feel free to poke me for comments, criticisms or suggestions. I need input from as many people as possible.

Welcome to our little community Greg!

I think that something a lot of us have talked about over the years is getting more highlights from games up on social media with appropriate game recap videos, etc. I primarily use twitter for sports news and whatnot and It seems like in the past we never got much in terms of that kind of stuff even for the big sports let alone the smaller ones.

Yeah, should have noticed a bit of an uptick in that this year. We now have the WSC clipping system for Football and Men's Basketball that auto-produces highlights that I've started pushing at the end of October after every game. It's usually later at night, like 2 hours after a game so they might be missed, but I'm also going to be putting them on YouTube.

For everything else, if it's on ESPN+ regardless of sport it will likely have rough highlights cut for it and posted. If it's not on ESPN, it might be pretty thin on video content.

Thou we are still well short on staffing for these sorts of things compared to P5 and G5 schools, so it's going to be a process.

hello and welcome! I believe in the 15+ year history of this (and the predecessor) board, you are the first staff person identify yourself, though I’m sure there have been plenty of lurkers. Nice to have you here! My connection to athletics, I’ve been going to Aggie football games since before I could talk, spent four years in the Aggie Band-uh back when we travelled to every single away game (the real band, not this new (sorry) Midwest high school knockoff band), and now I’m a fan from the eastern time zone.

The culture at UC Davis has historically been kind of simple and folksy but aged just to a fine maturity. Back along about 2007, Athletics and the university as a whole decided they were going to go with this “we’re big time now” persona—and it never really worked in the “is that your father’s suit jacket?” kind of way. And while they were busy doing whatever “big time things” they were doing, were sort of late to the party on social media (or even keeping the website up to date). To me the “voice” on social media has been like following IBM or Pfizer—not super timely, odd forced jokes, the appearance that every photo of students is staged and perfectly balanced with one of every race and gender and posts tend to just be announcements, not interactions (and comments get censored). There’s something to be said for the way Wendy’s and Universal Studios engage with people online.

When I think about the ESPN+ coverage, it’s weird they there’s no pregame/postgame show. We just jump in (if we’re lucky, sometimes due to technical issues we kiss a minute of the game. We can also sometimes hear the talent when they they think they are off the air and aren’t). And at the end they rush off the air like the sopranos are coming on… but it’s a stream, there is no other show starting. Back in the days when it was radio only—KHTK and KDVS, there was meaningful pre and post commentary.

As far as student interest and engagement, there’s the elephant in the room—as the university population has become more female and more Asian/Asian American, interest in athletics has dropped. I guess nobody has figured out how to make it relevant to some groups. That said, back in the 90s and 2000s there was more spirit. For example the Aggie Pack didn’t just have an emcee, there were “characters” that were part of an ongoing skit all season long and sometimes they would get together with the band and kind of push the envelope and really get the crowd going. If you were a student, you got an Aggie Pack card and non-students could get an Aggie Fanatics card. At every athletics event, you would get Aggie Bucks for signing in with one of those cards. Most games also had a giveaway item, candy, water bottle, etc usually a sponsored item. They would also hand out Aggie Bucks during the game—popular was tube sock madness where they would use a potato gun to launch tube socks full of Aggie Bucks and coupons. Sometimes they would hand them out at the exit gate too (helped people want to stay 4 quarters!). You could use the Aggie Bucks to buy merch, so fundamentally everyone in the stadium could get an Aggie Pack or Aggie Fanatics shirt free. And then whoever was working on “big time ideas” nixed all of that and decided it would actually be better to have no giveaways and just the bookstore selling $35 adidas T-shirts.

A LOUDER steam engine sound, similar to our D2 playoff days. On the field?

Cow bells?

Not sure why we struggle to put out FB game highlights, or does Coach Hawkins think that hurts
us? I would think those would have a big impact on recruits, and they would forward those clips to their HS classmates.

I appreciate the response and I did actually notice that we were getting some more highlights throughout football season. I'm glad to hear that you're doing your best to modernize Aggie athletics!

GO AGS!

Oklahoma St. crushed the Davis wrestling team from 2006-2009. The head coach at the time was always able to bring in top teams for dual meets.

Story time. My journey in athletics started when I ran an Oklahoma State message board. Would regularly complain about the website and other marketing issues. One day the AD called me and asked me if I thought I could do better, I said yes, and they hired me. lol. So I have a soft spot for message boards and know it's where all the real fans hang out. ;-)