UCF should heed lessons from Orlando City

I get jealous watching Orlando City games. I get jealous because I wish UCF fans were like Orlando City fans. Orlando City fans bring a passion and excitement to a game that is rarely matched. It is something that UCF has been missing. One would think that one of the largest enrollments would have a raucous crowd, with chants, signs, maybe even some flags flowing. Something to show that UCF fans are more than the bandwagon fans that Florida sports fans have been labeled as. But this is not just about the students, but rather all fans of UCF. We as fans need to take the Orlando City model and apply it to UCF. 

I believe that Orlando City has one of the best marketing team in sports. A marketing team that has gotten the city of Orlando to fully embrace a soccer team. Let us be honest, Orlando has a bad sports town reputation. Like any other major city in Florida, Orlando has been labeled a bandwagon town where the fans would rather go to Disney than a game. People point to the Magic's recent poor attendance record as evidence of this. Yet every single gameday, the town is covered in a sea of purple. Even outside of gamedays, one can see Orlando City hats, shirts, even car magnets all around the city. The so called sports fair-weather town has embraced the team. This is all due to the brilliance of the Orlando City marketing team, who have been aggressive in making Orlando a soccer town. The Fill The Bowl campaigns, the bar crawls, using La Grande Victoria  as the official anthem of the club, the formation of The Wall, all of this has brought the fans to Orlando City. More importantly the marketing team have embraced The Ruckus and the Iron Lion Firm, the fan groups of Orlando City. The team does not lecture about being true fans or attendance. Instead the team has encouraged the rowdy and tremendous behavior that have made the Orlando City fanbase one of the best in the MLS.  The team celebrating the uniqueness and passion of the diehards. So what is stopping UCF from replicating this?

Let's talk about the myth that surrounds UCF: that the school has students that do not care about the sports teams. Of course the students care throughout the school's history there have been student organizations that have gone to games, be it Kirk's Jerks, Rowdy Knights, The Gauntlet, the guys that would get together behind the right field wall at the baseball stadium,  or The Knights Watch. These fans have shown that UCF have students that care and are diehards. So has the school embraced the organizations like other colleges have? No, instead these organizations received maybe a casual mention in Knight News or on social media. Other than that there has been no real support from past athletic directors. Instead these organizations were restricted in what they could do, when they could meet, etc. So it was no wonder why these organizations have died off or are small in stature. I wonder what would have happened had the past administrations embraced these organizations like Orlando City has The Ruckus, how big these organizations would be. Also before you start saying that the students did not show up in the darkest of days of UCF athletics, I'm sorry this was the worst year in UCF athletics in history. I didn't see a lot of alumni at those games either. So don't bash the students who have tried to get organizations off the ground, but have had 0 support. Contrast that with how well the supporter organizations are treated by the Orlando City organization. It is here that UCF really needs to take a page from their soccer counterparts: embrace the student/fan organizations. 

Now onto the alumni, they too have been let down in the past. Sure there are watch parties, but those are almost exclusively for football. Where are the bar crawls for the basketball team? Where are the events for the biggest alumni base in the country? Why isn't every alumni tailgate as big and vaunted as the homecoming one? You

know what Todd Stanbury's biggest failure was? Which given his bumbling  tenure is saying something. Stansbury's biggest failure was giving away the home game season opener following the Fiesta Bowl for a game in damn Ireland.   Here UCF was coming off of the greatest season in school history cemented by the greatest upset in BCS history and instead of a celebration the team goes to friggan Ireland. What does anyone remember from the game besides making Christian Hackenburg look like a 1st round pick? The alumni had waited so long for the team to finally arrive on the national stage, which it had and yet the first game after the 2014 season is on a different continent. Where was the pep rally, where was the spectacle as a tribute to the 2014 team? And no I don't mean the event immediately after they won. Oh sure some will say that there was a parade in Disney and that if we wanted a celebration we should have gone to Ireland. Sorry that some of us had jobs and couldn't fly. Moving the ho,e game from Brighthouse to Ireland was just plain dumb and  cost the alumni a chance to go back and say thank you to the 2014 team.

There are so many Orlando City shirts and other memorabilia that flood Orlando in and around gameday. It is like the city has officially adopted the color purple as the official color of Orlando. Even around the state there is tons of Orlando City gear. It is the cool thing to be an Orlando City fan. Herein lies the issue with some of the UCF fanbase: they don't want "t shirt fans" to support the team. You know the fans that get the shirt because the team is winning or is cool. I will never understand this. UCF needs to reach out to the fans, especially in Central Florida and make it cool to be a UCF fan. Even if the people did not attend the university, welcome them into the fanbase. Of course winning cures all, but the hiring of Scott Frost with his offense will attract "t-shirt" fans. UCF fans need to welcome these fans into the fold and not act like The Plastics from Mean Girls. Some UCF fans recently got on the fans that flew a plane asking O'Leary to resign and fans that wore paper bags over their heads. Why? What makes some of these UCF fans think they are better than the fans that show passion and voice their displeasure? That needs to change.