Mount Royal Cougar Community

Communities are so essential for several different reasons; Social interaction, community involvement, change, success, challenging the process, enabling others to act, and the list goes on.
Each one of us is involved in multiple communities, whether we think we are or not. The one community I chose to focus on was the Mount royal Cougar athletic community. We are a large group, we strive to be leaders inside and outside of the classroom, and even though we may all be on different sports teams and working towards separate goals as teams and individuals, but as a group we are a community.
I have spoken with a few of my teammates, as well as a few athletes on different teams around campus.
Instead of looking at improving the quality of life for our community and chose to look at the quality of fan support, which has has its perks as well as its downfalls.
Fan support is a challenging part of athletics, especially within Canadian schools. As students we should be proud of where we went to school, and supporting your Universities athletics should give us a huge sense of pride, so why is it that it is so difficult to gain that support that we so desperately need. It comes down to a few different things;

1) Large cities, such as Calgary, have professional teams like the Calgary Flames and the Stampeders. Calgary is also equipped with junior teams like the Hitmen. Just competing with these 3 teams alone makes it difficult to gain that fan support at a Collegiate level. Take in mind that I didn't even mention the smaller clubs such as the Calgary Buffs, or Royals.
Universities in the United states for example are located in smaller towns (Not all of them but most are), for example Niagara, Cornell, Clarkson, Robert Morris, Mercyhurst, Colgate, New Hampshire. These Universities recieve massive fan support due to the fact they have no professional teams located nearby.

2) Media coverage and game promotion is considerably lower in Canadian schools than in American schools. With the lack of coverage, means the lack of knowledge, which pushes our students away from support rather than encouraging it. I believe that Canadian schools can do a better job at promoting Game days in Canadian schools.

3) Student-Athletes are rarely recognized in classrooms, which makes it "intimidating" for classmates to approach an athlete and relate to them. Whereas if student-athletes were known around campus and recognized it would be easy for students to approach them and become supportive of their sport which would make for a stronger fan base and even possibly a better over-all experience through-out a students University experience.



These are just a few examples of why Cougar Athletes have little fan support, other than family members or close friends of athletes, but there are numerous ways to improve this "quality of life".
One possible way would be to upgrade our facilities. The Men's and Women's hockey teams recently had an upgrade in their hockey arena and both received new dressing rooms, which is a huge draw for new recruits. But the simple fact that they play at the Calgary community arena's should be a huge draw in just due to the fact that there is a bar located upstairs between the two arena's. If there were drink specials offered for those students who are willing to come out and support their Cougars, as well as a bus provided after dropping students off at a local bar, or bringing them to and from the arena, these could be huge potential marketing schemes to create that fan support that our school so desperately needs.
I think that with the proper promotion of Games, facilities, and our athletes, we could improve our fan base, and essentially improve the "quality of fan life" within our schools across Canada.