Big-time college basketball environment Thursday night at Winthrop Coliseum wasn’t luck

As the Winthrop Coliseum rocked and rattled Thursday night, Ken Halpin sat in his office in the building’s bowels getting some work done.

He felt and heard when Duby Okeke out-jumped several UNC Asheville players for an offensive rebound and exclamatory slam dunk that tipped a game between Big South contenders in Winthrop’s direction.

Halpin said Friday morning that he often intentionally avoids things he can’t control. Results on a basketball court fall in that category. So Halpin, the 34-year old who became Winthrop’s athletic director last summer, was catching up on work during the tense second half of the Eagles’ nationally-televised win over Asheville, a game that saw one of the best Winthrop Coliseum environments -- and the biggest crowd -- in coach Pat Kelsey’s four years in Rock Hill.

“There was life in that building last night,” Halpin said. “It’s something that’s addicting. So we’re really motivated to do that hard work to get it back again. And maybe something natural will sustain it. But until then, we’ve got work to do.”

The grunt work that created Thursday’s atmosphere began a week earlier.

Halpin didn’t have enough time before the season to put together a comprehensive promotional and marketing plan for men’s basketball, so he decided to pinpoint several games where the athletic department would go all in.

The initial target would be Winthrop’s first high-profile, (hopefully) nationally televised game after the college football season was over. Kelsey rightly guessed that ESPNU and the Big South would want to show the Winthrop-Asheville game, a rematch of the league’s 2016 tournament final, to a nationwide audience.

Halpin and his administrative team put together at least 11 efforts to attract people to the game. Videos of Kelsey imploring the community to support the team flooded Winthrop’s Facebook page and athletic web site, and a Winthrop athletics staffer called the presidents of all 12 of the school’s Greek life organizations on Martin Luther King Day. The fraternity that brought the most members would win $250.

A partnership with Winthrop First-year Experience, which helps integrate freshmen into college life, proved fruitful in boosting student attendance. And the athletic department nudged corporate partners to bring employees, friends and families. Almost 1,000 tickets went to that end, though Halpin doesn’t yet know how many were actually used.

The 11 ideas made one push that worked.

Over 3,200 fans, including 1,200 students, showed up on a school night for a 9 p.m. tip-off. Winthrop’s total enrollment is 6,100 and Halpin was thrilled to get nearly a fifth of the students to make the short trek down Eden Terrace to the coliseum.

“What I credit most last night is our student body showing up and supporting our team,” Halpin said. “That’s the biggest domino if we can continue to capture that. Most of this morning was, ‘alright, how do we not just show up next time and suddenly it’s back to normal?’ We want to redefine normal.”

Both coaches felt the atmosphere.

“It was a fun environment,” said Asheville’s Nick McDevitt. “That baseline, the wall of students, they were loud and ready to go. Congratulations to Winthrop and not just the team, but that’s a good showing on national television for the town, the university and the athletic department.”

Kelsey, who has always made promotion a part of his job as a basketball coach, whether at Wake Forest, Xavier or Winthrop, stayed after Wednesday’s practice for 30 minutes finalizing the team’s new intro video, which debuted Thursday, before recording a video of himself rapping to Run D.M.C’s “It’s Tricky”.

“I’ve got no game,” he said Thursday night. “My wife was like, ‘what are you doing?’”

A number of factors make Winthrop unlike a traditional Southern sports-crazy state school, and attendance at sporting events has long been an issue. That’s why Halpin was meeting with his two top deputies, Matt Martin and Renae Myles, after the game and into the early hours of Friday morning. With the experience fresh on their minds, the trio broke down what worked and what didn’t.

There were obvious successes, but failures too.

One of the Coliseum speakers blew out during player introductions. And after Winthrop made a second half run that stoked the crowd and forced an Asheville timeout, what Halpin called a “hot timeout,” a fan was brought onto the floor to undertake a 1980s music quiz. The buzzing atmosphere promptly deflated, underscoring an equally important component of Halpin’s goals.

“Anybody that was new last night walked away with a memory and a feeling like, ‘this is big-time college basketball,’” said Halpin. “And so now, to keep those people coming back, we’ve got to give them that big-time feel.”

Blasting the right music during hot timeouts contributes. So does winning.

Kelsey said he had a fleeting “what have I done” moment when he stepped into the coliseum and heard the roar of the student section. Winning Thursday night felt doubly important given the effort that went into coaxing fans into the building.

Kelsey fretted, but Halpin ignored the one thing he couldn’t control Thursday night: the game’s outcome.

Winthrop “hired Pat Kelsey to take care of basketball and he’s really good at it,” Halpin said. “Watching the game you kind of get tugged and tied into the emotions of it. I find sometimes it’s hard to do the job professionally when you’re getting emotionally pulled on so much.”

That led Halpin back to his office for the crucial stretch. As the coliseum buzzed and howled in a way that reminded many of Winthrop basketball’s hey-day 10 years ago, when 3,000 to 4,000 fans was a normal night, the young AD was busily trying to make sure it wasn’t a one-off.

This story was originally published January 20, 2017 at 2:46 PM with the headline "Big-time college basketball environment Thursday night at Winthrop Coliseum wasn’t luck."