patfanmike

Our sports teams represent the State of Massachusetts, not the City of Amherst and should perform in front of the Residents of Massachusetts.

A basketball team that plays over 30 games should schedule at least 1 game every year in Pittsfield, Springfield, Worcester, and Boston. This year we are playing 1 game in Springfield. Holy Cross isn't on the schedule however they would be a good opponent to play in Worcester ever other year at the Worcester Arena.

A basketball doubleheader, the Men's BB Team and Women's BB team would be even better.

Playing games in the major metropolitan areas would build fan support and help recruiting for these and other sports. Another major benefit, increased applications, donations, and public support.

Football is somewhat more difficult as we only play 5-6 home games plus 1-2 playoff games. At least 1 football game should be played in Eastern Massachusetts and the logical place is in Foxboro since the stadium, access roads, and train serve the Patriots Stadium.

What over stadiums with at least 20K seats are available?

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Lark

Basketball: In fact we did just add a 2-for-1 with Holy Cross to the basketball schedule. The away game next year will be played at the larger Worcester arena, not HC's on campus gym. We tried to work something with Northeastern, but it looks like we're going to end up playing them in a tournament at Michigan. Home-and-homes with Boston College are still on the schedule, they're in Amherst this year. Next year we're playing Memphis at TDBanknorth Garden. As every UMass fan knows, we had Kentucky scheduled for TDBanknorth last season, but their new coach pussed out of the commitment. URI is always on the schedule for the SE Mass folks.

Football: We just played a game in Worcester at Holy Cross's 23k capacity stadium. That home-and-home series resumes in 2010. We have games in Boston every other year at Northeastern. Boston College is scheduled for 2011. Games in Rhode Island and southern New Hampshire are on the schedule every other year. That's about everyone, unless Harvard wants to play us (they don't). Gillette Stadium isn't an option. UMass does really well for a FCS school getting 15-16k crowds in a 17k capacity stadium, but our ticket prices are really low. We'd need much higher prices and much, much larger crowds for a Gillette rental to make sense. The only sane opponent to play there is BC, and they'd make much more money playing us at Chestnut Hill. If we don't want to play there, they have a whole bunch of other local FCS schools to choose from, so we have no leverage. We're lucky they schedule us at all, they could just rotate between Northeastern, URI and Maine if they wanted. If UMass was a FBS school, then maybe a 1-1-1 would make sense, with one game at Gillette.

Hockey: we're at BC, BU, NU, Lowell, and Andover every year, along with Providence and UNH. Nothing at Worcester though, should add HC again. And maybe we should try playing UConn at Springfield, they have an AHL team.

Pittsfield: do they have any suitable sports facilities? If they had a suitable football facility, I'd say try talking Albany into giving us an "away" game in Pittsfield. I don't think anything else makes sense out there.