Bull Pit boosting school spirit

In face of low student attendance at games, USD is making school spirit a priority

Anderson Haigler / Sports Editor / The USD Vista

At times, it can feel like the University of San Diego has it all. Breathtaking views, a pristine campus, rigorous academics, and even a handful of consistently competitive Division I sports teams. But historically, there’s been something missing from Alcala Park: school spirit. It’s one of the few knocks on the USD experience as a whole, as students both past and present have lamented the collective apathy toward athletics that has crept into the psyche of the student body. It’s an issue, however, that both USD students and administrators are working tirelessly to address.

“It is front burner for me, every day,” USD Associate Vice president and Executive Director of Athletics Bill McGillis said of his focus on the lack of school spirit at the university. 

“I think (the level of school spirit is) escalating a bit. But not nearly as rapidly nearly as rapidly as I’d like.”

The task of fixing that shortcoming has not been easy. In a city like San Diego where the beaches, nightlife, and countless other attractions beckon to college students, it’s hard to make a college sports game a destination on a weekend night. Progress has been slow, but steady, and the Bull Pit, USD’s student section, has undergone a transformation over the last couple years as part of these efforts. Leading that progress is Robbie Hill, a 2014 USD graduate and the current Assistant Director for Marketing in USD Athletics, and he spoke about the challenges that he and the students of the Bull Pit have faced in trying to build energy around USD’s 17 Division I sports.

“Obviously it’s tough,” Hill said. “We never wanna blame the Pacific Ocean, but that, of course, is always a factor with the beach and so many things going on in San Diego.”

Hill and McGillis both view their mission to get more students to games as a work in progress. The Bull Pit in its current form has only been around since 2014, and compared to Gonzaga University’s “The Kennel Club,” which is in its 34th season of existence, or San Diego State’s “The Show,” which dates back to 2001, the USD student section as it stands today is in its infancy. This relative newness in comparison to other school’s rowdy crowds may have contributed to the lack of identity and turnout student-wise.

“School spirit as a whole, I think is still being defined,” Hill said. “I don’t think there’s a big emotional attachment to our brand, and that’s something that we’ve really tried to address this year.”

The Bull Pit’s most recent efforts have centered around student experiences in conjunction with the games — incentives for Toreros to show up. These have ranged from giving away Coachella tickets at a men’s basketball game to a “Kombucha Kickback” or free tacos at another. They’ve also placed a heavy emphasis on partnering with fraternities and sororities on campus, and have enjoyed a handful of greek life-themed nights at baseball and basketball games — the winning chapter of a greek life-oriented spirit competition will earn the chance to take batting practice at Fowler Park. Partnerships with other on-campus groups like the  Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán (MEChA) have also proved to be fruitful. To Hill, incentives like these are a way to engage students in a way that they hadn’t been previously.

“The mission of the Bull Pit is to create a multisensory experience at games, to make things fun,” Hill said. “We’ve been working with a lot more sponsors, Urbane Cafe, we have a great partnership with them, we’ve been giving out sandwich cards. The Coachella tickets, we had one of our athletes win it, she went and had a great time.”

Sometimes, giveaways like these have worked, and worked well. Highlights of student attendance in this past year included more than 300 students showing up to cheer on the women’s volleyball team as they took on then-national No. 1 Brigham Young University in an electric match. And the men’s basketball team’s matchup with Gonzaga continued to be a success in terms of student attendance, as the Bull Pit boasted its largest, and most cohesive crowd in recent memory in the Jenny Craig Pavilion. But the challenge, however, lies in creating a buzz that goes beyond when top-ranked teams come to town. 

“It can’t just be about the Gonzaga basketball game,” McGillis said. “Because the fun and the impact that our students experience at that game — we can do the same thing against Saint Mary’s and BYU and LMU and Pepperdine — if we choose to as a campus community. But we’ve gotta change the mindset that’s all about the Gonzaga game.” 

McGillis elaborated on how he hopes to change the way the Torero community views big games like those.

“It can’t be about Gonzaga,” McGillis said. “It has to be about USD, it’s gotta be about the Toreros. We’ve gotta work to change that. And we are.”

Exactly how the USD Athletic Department will work to shift that perception remains to be seen. This past season, however, both the scope and organization of the Bull Pit has become greater.

“(In the past), we didn’t have an exec board, we didn’t have anything at all,” Hill said. “And now we’re getting an Associated Students Athletics Committee moving into this next year, with athletes, with exec, with Torero Program Board. So it’s a little more cohesive.”

Hill mentioned that the executive board will be more representative of the student body as a whole in the upcoming year.

“Something we’re really, really gonna focus on is — our Bull Pit executive board was mostly athletes — and while that’s obviously a strength, it’s also a weakness because your umbrella and your reach is limited. So this next year, we are trying to recruit a couple greeks to be on that panel. Really, giving insight in a way so that it’s not just all athletes, and you’re getting a big reach.”

They also have their sights set on something more tangible. 

“A huge opportunity looking forward is a tailgating thing,” Hill said. “Getting a space, that’s really our next launch, getting a space before games.”

In terms of space during games, the Bull Pit found a new place to watch Torero basketball in the last year: court-side, on the baseline, under the basket, a significant upgrade from their upper-level seating of previous years and a change that displaced an amount of season-ticket holders. But McGillis stated that the move was worth it, and demonstrated a commitment to the student section at USD.

“What I envision is that whole side eventually opposite the team benches being full of students at all games,” McGillis said. “We knew that would take some time to get traction, but we went ahead and made the decision to relocate everyone on that side of the arena…so that our students could have what most people would view as the best seats in the arena.”

For as much thought as Hill and the university have put into finding ways to create engagement between the average USD student and the school’s athletic programs, the burden of finding a way to get Toreros to attend games may not fall solely on the Bull Pit. 

“I think (school spirit) starts with winning, and we have to do that at a higher level,” McGillis said. 

It’s a two-way street. For as much as students like showing up to watch winning teams, athletes feed off of their home crowd’s energy. And nearly every athlete and coach who was  asked about school spirit in this past year expressed appreciation for the students that did show up, and the raucous atmosphere that was sometimes created in the JCP. It’s just that there could be more, and it could happen more consistently. Perhaps similarly to McGillis’ assessment that winning needs to happen more consistently.

Though Hill and McGillis both acknowledge that a wealth of work remains to be done before USD steps into the same metaphorical ballpark school spirit-wise as universities like Gonzaga and SDSU, they both noted that progress has been made. 

“I think there’s more and more students that want to contribute to increasing school spirit,” McGillis said. “There’s more people talking about it, there’s more people meeting about it. And I do think there’s been some improvement in our student attendance. We’re gonna continue to work at it every day. Literally every day. And I think it might be the single greatest challenge we have as an athletic department — changing the environment at our home games in order to inspire the team that’s playing, and to make the environment more conducive to recruiting great student-athletes.”

Hill offered his perspective on the progress that has been made.

“We got an email from the guy who started the Bull Pit, it said, ‘I’m really seeing a lot of changes in terms of uniformity,’” Hill said. “Yes, we are not seeing insane numbers, we’re not seeing this huge spike. But if we don’t have a base, we can’t kind of launch off of that.”

McGillis, Hill, and the Bull Pit’s overall approach to boosting engagement points to something larger: they’re trying to build a culture that goes beyond simply attending games, and more toward having USD students be proud to be a Torero.

“School spirit is not just going to athletics games in my opinion,” Hill said. “It’s ‘bleeding blue,’ being a Torero. We’re not saying the Bull Pit is more important, we’re saying you’re more important. Come join. We have a seat for you.”

The Bull Pit’s efforts to raise school spirit at USD will continue in the fall.