NCAA appearances a boost for Wofford

By Anna Mitchell  

APRIL 2, 2010 9:16 a.m. (0)

A lost possession in the closing seconds might have robbed Wofford College men of their biggest basketball win in program history.

But the 49-53 loss to the University of Wisconsin in the first round of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament in Jacksonville, Fla., was exciting enough to merit television time on the tournament’s busiest day – and the match up against the Badgers unusual enough to land the Terriers appearances on ESPN, CBS, National Public Radio and countless newspapers across the country.

Quantifying the benefits of all that attention is impossible in many respects to measure now, but Web hits and online giving are promising early indicators.

The college’s visitors page has had a 392 percent bump in hits in March compared to February, and twice as many visitors have landed on Wofford’s Facebook page. Also, compared to March 2009, giving online to Wofford exploded six fold this past month – from just under $5,000 a year ago to almost $30,000 in March 2010.

Part of that bump might be due to a redesign of the Web site that makes giving online easier, said Director of Annual Giving Lisa De Freitas, but alumni have also been more willing to check out the school’s spur-of-the-moment March Madness fund-raiser.

“We’ve sent out five messages so far totaling about 23,000 recipients,” De Freitas said. “Our average open rate has been 20 percent. That doesn’t sound great but the average open rate for non-profit appeals is 14 percent.”

Perhaps more important – and least measurable at this point – is the boost to the school’s name recognition, said Richard Johnson, the school’s athletic director. The first purpose of Wofford athletics is to provide young men and women with meaningful lessons on the field they can carry with them the rest of their lives, he said.

But the name recognition that comes with having competitive, Division I football and basketball programs has had an ancillary benefit, he said. The high academic standards of the Wofford – like peer institutions Furman, Davidson, Sewanee and Milsap – decreases the pool of students who qualify for admission in any given year, Johnson said.

“That’s why we play games across the country,” he said.

The football team played Wisconsin this past fall, and the basketball squad played Michigan State and Pittsburgh – all losses, but a way to distinguish Wofford. Forty percent of Wofford students are out-of-state. Wins against the University of Georgia, Auburn, USC and Purdue, meanwhile, have shown the program is solid.

“It does increase the visibility of the brand,” he said. “This may not be as important to a regional public school like University of Washington or Nebraska.”

He said he and Coach Mike Young have been flooded with calls, e-mails and text messages – too many to respond to.

Brand Stille, Wofford’s vice president for enrollment, said he will know in coming weeks whether the tournament appearance will bring a bump in campus visits from prospective freshmen. Applications were already due Feb. 1, so the tournament won’t have an effect there, he said.

The school of 1,450 received more than 2,500 applications to fill 420 freshmen slots this past fall, he said. Wofford usually accepts about 60 percent of those who apply but might find itself with a larger-than-normal freshman class if too many high-school seniors take Wofford up on its invitation to attend.

“Other schools in our situation have seen changes in yields,” he said of student acceptances.

Wofford helped boost its own image in Jacksonville, Johnson said, by selling more tickets – 775 – than the seven other teams appearing there. Johnson said hundreds of fans who missed their chance to buy a ticket through the school went to brokers online or called one of the other schools to buy their spare tickets.

“It felt like a home game in Jacksonville,” Johnson said. “It was really unprecedented. Some people were just determined they were going to be there.”

Wofford souvenirs disappeared from the arena’s gift shops, too, he said.

“My wife went back to buy another shirt, and there was nothing left – every size of every style was gone,” he said.

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