Sidney Speaks

09-10 Basketball47

Asking for some forgiveness from you guys as I have been down for the count sick the last couple of days. Was feeling guilty about not updating the blog, so wanted to quickly throw a couple of interviews with Coach Lowe up for your review.

Dave Glenn interviews Sidney and Coach Lowe does an excellent job of avoiding the minefield and baiting that DG tried. No more about that.

Second interview Coach Lowe talks about fan support and other very interesting items..

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09-10 Basketball

47 Responses to Sidney Speaks

  1. Texpack 12/10/2009 at 3:18 PM #

    I thought Coach Lowe sounded pretty upbeat. It was also interesting to see what his comments were about the attitudes on the team this year vs the past. Personally, I think he should have done a bit more to squelch the pissing and moaning over the past couple of seasons. If he’s not prepared to step in a nip some of that in the future, he needs to be very careful about who he recruits. This team is really going to be up and down over the course of this season. I just want to see the stinky games get farther apart as the year goes on and the good games get better as well.

  2. Cncstatefan17 12/10/2009 at 3:38 PM #

    The real issue with lack of home court advantage is the fact that students just aren’t interested in going to the games. I always sit in the front row of the pep band so I always give my ticket away, but students are hardly interested. They are uneducated on the history of NC State athletics.

    I live in Syme Hall. I was watching a basketball game on TV in my room, and my neighbor Philip walked in just in time to catch part of Jimmy V’s Espy speech on a commercial. I gave a mini round of applause and he asked Why?

  3. drizzlewolf 12/10/2009 at 5:15 PM #

    It’s hard to be interested in going to the games at an off-campus arena. Besides, the RBC isn’t what i think of as a great basketball venue. I live in SC and have season tix to the Gamecocks and their arena is awesome because it is about 7000 seats smaller. Sometimes you have to sacrifice seats for the sake of environment. Look at Cameron or Littlejohn(Clemson). Those places get to rockin when the crowd is going. It’s not always about how many seats you have but how many of those seats have butts in them.

  4. Classof89 12/10/2009 at 5:37 PM #

    Ouch–local broadcaster and Pack alum Mark Thomas ranks Lowe DFL among the conferences basketball coaches in this blog entry:

    http://www.wralsportsfan.com/voices/blogpost/6585165/

    Do you agree with his ranking of Lowe 12th for Xs and Os, and 11th for relations with alumni, media, etc.?

  5. Pack Mentality 12/10/2009 at 5:48 PM #

    Classof89: I will hold off on ym analysis until the end of this season. If we don’t finish better than 10th, then I’d rank Lowe dead last in every category

  6. papackman 12/10/2009 at 6:34 PM #

    Ranking coaches 8-10 games into the season….what a bunch of crap….and was it tough to figure out #1 …..good Ol Roy. No disrespect to you Class… but Mark Thomas can shove it…..he’s just filling white space!! Hey Mark….make yourself useful and find Tiger’s # 12 so we can have a calendar!!!

    And on subject—great interview Sid!!

  7. 61Packer 12/10/2009 at 6:34 PM #

    I wouldn’t rank Lowe DFL in the area of relations with the alumni. There are a whole lot of people on this site who continue to support Lowe despite his dismal ACC mark.

  8. theghost 12/10/2009 at 6:55 PM #

    ^awful lot of folks waiting to take pot shots at him no matter what he does, too. Agree with papack – this is pure filler. Notice that the “ranking” is oddly similar to acc standings – this is a “ranking” of programs relabeled as coaches to sell ad space. is roy the #1 recruiter? or does he have the easiest recruiting job?

    I don’t think Sid rates too poorly in charisma, by the way – seems pretty engaging and down to earth to me and everyone I’ve heard who’s met him.

  9. Baylisascaris 12/10/2009 at 7:43 PM #

    Glenn is such a D-bag. I would love to bitch slap him some day.

  10. FunPack 12/10/2009 at 8:53 PM #

    Classof89, if you look at the whole list it’s kind of hard to take that thing seriously. I think this is more just to stir the pot than anything else. That or Mark Thomas knows little about basketball.

    To the original post, I do like Sid’s interviews. Sometimes I even wonder if he says too much. But heck of a lot better than you-know-who.

  11. packof81 12/10/2009 at 10:30 PM #

    “It’s hard to be interested in going to the games at an off-campus arena. Besides, the RBC isn’t what i think of as a great basketball venue.”

    Amen, drizzlewolf. I’ve been harping on this for years. The RBC center sucks. Period. The seats are tiny and cramped. It’s a hockey arena that was rammed down our throats.

    “Look at Cameron or Littlejohn(Clemson). Those places get to rockin when the crowd is going. It’s not always about how many seats you have but how many of those seats have butts in them.”

    Amen again, drizzlewolf. Reynolds is vastly superior for Wolfpack basketball games. It’s deafening in there and more importantly, it’s right in the middle of campus. So the students will show up and every seat will have a butt in it. And attached to that butt will be a loud mouth! Not enough room for alumni? Students should be the priority. Anyway, what do the alumni care about attending the games if we’re getting our butts kicked? So long as Coach K is at Duke they’ll never move from Cameron because he knows the magic of that place.

    Maybe if the hurricanes stink up a few more seasons they’ll move the franchise to another market, shutter the RBC and let us have the Pack back in Reynolds where they belong.

  12. Gene 12/11/2009 at 12:36 AM #

    The media’s making an issue of attendance this year. For most of the prior years we’ve been in the RBC center men’s basketball was usually in the top 20 nationally with regards to attendance. I know with a stadium the size of the RBC, we could easily be in the top 5 nationally, in terms of attendance, but given the product on the court and corporate LTR holders not giving out those tickets for every game our attendance hasn’t been bad.

    I’m not sure what people expect attendance to be after finishing 10th, 12th and 10th in the conference for the past three years, with a pre-season projection of another 12th place finish. Most teams at the bottom of the conference don’t have good attendance.

    Winning will put butts in seats. Period.

    I remember Reynolds being half full, when Les was coaching. Speaking of the love fest with moving back to Reynolds, our athletics budget can’t afford for men’s basketball to move back to Reynolds. Maybe a slightly smaller arena would’ve been better, say 15,000 to 17,000 but the athletics department needs the extra money it makes from selling those several thousand extra tickets at the RBC Center.

    People carp about the athletics department not spending money. They’d spend less, if we played at Reynolds because they’d have less money coming in.

    There are two sports, which pay for the rest of the athletics department – football and men’s basketball. You can’t make a decision that’d effect the finances of either sport, just because of sentiment.

  13. JeremyH 12/11/2009 at 2:08 AM #

    i know the comments here have been centered around the attendance issue, but I want to say something about this quote regarding getting shots. now I’m not sure the context of the passage, and the media has a way of skewing things, but i don’t like to hear this from the coach. just like he has benched Degand as a disciplinary action (grades, whatever), he could have asserted control of the team by benching players demanding shots. so I place as much blame on that issue with him as with the player(s) in question, heck let’s just say in that respect, the “team” concept broke down. and this happened over the last 2 seasons. so try not to place blame.

    to summarize, there are no “free passes” because some selfish guys wanted to improve their draft status, so please don’t try to turn it into one. maybe Sidney watched “Coach Carter” after that, because the team looks cohesive, thus far, so let’s focus on that.

  14. Wulfpack 12/11/2009 at 7:49 AM #

    Very good point, Jeremy. I’m in total agreement.

    And can we please drop the whole RBC/Reynolds argument? Don’t waste your time, nothing’s happening any time soon.

  15. Alpha Wolf 12/11/2009 at 8:28 AM #

    Ever since the novelty of playing in the RBC wore off, there have been a number of people who have pined for returning to Reynolds. Almost to a man, their arguments have lacked much sense of the economic realities involved in doing such a thing, which in turn makes their argument ring hollow. But reality is a fact-driven experience, and the truth is that the rules of money rule college sports as surely as the laws of physics govern the Universe. It just is what it is.

    I’m not trying to insult anyone by pointing that out, I am simply saying that there will be no “return to Reynolds” nor will any on-campus arena be constructed for at least the next 25 years. The only thing that would make it possible would be a cataclysm that physically destroyed the RBC Center. Chances of that are slim.

    A better discussion would be how to enhance the RBC Center experience and how to turn it to the advantage of our team. I think, for example, that there should be a better way for STH’s to re-allocate their lower bowl seats that would otherwise go empty for a game that cannot attend, and give them to someone up in the third level for a nominal service charge. I do not know how that could be done, but I do believe that a way for it to happen could be devised and implemented by the Wolfpack Club. As to students attending the games, better transportation is a no-brainer, but it would require someone in the Athletic Department or the WPC to reach into their wallets and fund it. Good luck with that, but it can and should be done.

  16. Oldwolf 12/11/2009 at 8:55 AM #

    I don’t think that the attendance is a problem, as others have stated, we have been ranked in the top 25 in attendance.

    Sid makes this statement:

    “Our guys walked on the court just to shoot around, and the lower bowl was just packed,” Lowe said. “The heckling and everything just started, and that’s an intimidating factor.”

    This is one of the main issues with the RBC – much/most of the seats in lower bowl (especailly on the sidelines) are owned by corporations and are often used sporadically. I know that my company has 20-30 tickets at mid-court in the lower bowl and uses them for marketing and sales.

    Often these (corporate) seats are empty and the RBC policy does not allow people w/o tickets to move down into those emptey seats.

    This quite often gives the appearance ofseemingly bad fan support.

    I am not sure what the solution is, but I think that this is the main reson for the appearance of “bad attendance” even when we are in the top 25 in the country in attendance – and the winning just hasn’t been there for a while.

  17. Wulfpack 12/11/2009 at 9:16 AM #

    No, bad attendance is when you are playing your first worthy opponent at home in the ACC Big 10 Challenge, and you draw 11,000. Just the facts.

  18. choppack1 12/11/2009 at 9:49 AM #

    The attendance for the Northwestern game was horrid.

    Lots of reasons for this that have been discussed on the forums:
    1> We have sucked the last 3 years.
    2> People expect us to suck this year.
    3> Northwestern still has the reputation as an awful basketball team and won’t draw the interest from a casual fan.
    4> The gestapo at the RBC won’t let folks into the lower bowl.
    5> The RBC for most fans, is a pretty bad environment to watch the game.

    We aren’t leaving the RBC, but the Athletic Department needs to think long and hard about what it can do to make the experience more enjoyable and electrify the atmosphere when we don’t play UNC or Duke.

    I’m w/ Jeremy on Coach Lowe’s complaints – about both the fans and his former players. Take a little ownership Coach – you’re actually part of the problem. That doesn’t mean you can’t be part of the solution, but if we hadn’t been so horrid the last few years, the atmosphere would be better.

  19. newt 12/11/2009 at 10:09 AM #

    Many years ago we hired a young journalism student and asked him to write some articles for the company newsletter. One of the first articles he presented focused on “controversy at the daycare!” David Glenn reminds me of that kid in the first part of this interview.

  20. Crafty 12/11/2009 at 10:25 AM #

    For a quick and easy way to improve the atmosphere on gameday at the RBC Center, one need look no further than the introduction sequence. They get everyone all pumped up and cheering, then they drop the video right in the middle of everything basically draining the life out of the arena (don’t get me started on it’s content0. If they led off with the video, that would help tremendously.

    And to the folks that started the “new tradition’ of directing folks when to clap to the fight song . . . Trust me, we all know when to join in and it sounds much better when you let us do it on our own.

  21. coach13 12/11/2009 at 10:33 AM #

    I’m sure contractually it couldn’t happen, but I’d love to see at least about 12 games in Reynolds. The NewOrleans, Elons, GaSo, NCCU, etc…all at Reynolds. The games you know will not sale out. The RBC does not have a good atmosphere. Took my son (big into Pack and sports) to the NO game, not alot there. Everybody spread out…scattered. We left early at his request.

  22. jbpackfan 12/11/2009 at 10:44 AM #

    ^^Well the intro video is terrible. A more exciting video would help the pre-game energy level. How about a 100-year tribute showing great moments of Wolfpack basketball set to some good music? Why is that so hard?

    As for the RBC, it will rock when we get some consistent success, though I think it sucks as a college basketball arena right now.

  23. choppack1 12/11/2009 at 10:50 AM #

    “As for the RBC, it will rock when we get some consistent success, though I think it sucks as a college basketball arena right now.”

    We don’t know that. It may still suck even if we’re a Top 15 team.

  24. drizzlewolf 12/11/2009 at 10:54 AM #

    I’m pretty sure that moving back to Reynolds isn’t the answer, but the fact remains that the RBC is a poor BBall venue. I think that the corporate seats filling the lower bowl is a problem that most teams face if they share an arena with a pro team/municipality. Face it, the Pack is’t the RBC’s main priority. Thats why they sell all of those corporate seats. Maybe the answer is a cooperation between the RBC and BBall to get those lower tickets to students/fans who want them. It’s not like those seats arent paid for already by the corp.

  25. newt 12/11/2009 at 10:56 AM #

    2 things to help the RBC are:

    1 – reconfigure the student seating so that it’s closer to the playing floor.

    2 – figure out a way that folks can move from the rafters to available lower level seats – it just makes sense to get as many fans as close to the floor as possible.

    Of course, these things would require somebody in charge who actually cares about the game of basketball in general, and in particular NC State ball.

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