BLOOMINGTON — Darian DeVries will bring his Indiana basketball team to his city this week.
Twice.
And then again in two weeks.
And then two weeks after that.
Beginning with Thursday night’s Hoosier Hoops on Kirkwood event downtown, IU will embark upon a month of events marking the most aggressively fan-facing preseason it has conducted in years. The October schedule also includes a Friday night scrimmage this week, an Oct. 17 preseason home game against Marian and the return of the Haunted Hall of Hoops, Oct. 30.
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“We want,” DeVries said, “to make sure that we’re a big part of the community, a big part of the campus.”
The events themselves are not remarkable. The more fundamental signal they send is.
Indiana needs to earn back the trust of a fanbase frustrated by a decade spent wrestling mediocrity and exhausted by a relentlessly spinning carousel of failed coaching tenures.
That starts Thursday night on Kirkwood Avenue, where IU will take the glitzier parts of Hoosier Hysteria — player intros, skills competitions, etc. — to the heart of its student body.
Anyone who knows Bloomington knows Thursday nights downtown belong to IU students, who fill the many bars lining a street that used to run through campus until the construction of the Sample Gates. Since the city continued pedestrianizing significant portions of the downtown thoroughfare post-COVID, Kirkwood has developed a block-party identity in the runway between campus and the courthouse square.
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Hoosier Hoops on Kirkwood will span the 300, 400 and 500 blocks of the street (basically the library to the Sample Gates). According to a news release promoting the event, it will include “player introductions, skills competitions and meet-and-greet opportunities.”
Basketball purists who value Midnight Madness-type events for the scrimmage portion of proceedings will get that in standalone form Friday night at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall. But it doesn’t feel like an accident that the students go first.
It remains a point of substantial pride that Indiana — with its cavernous arena and large student body — boasts one of the biggest student sections in the country. Annually, about 7,800 of Assembly Hall’s 17,222 seats are reserved for student season tickets.
Compare that to the Izzone or the Paint Crew, the student sections at Michigan State and Purdue, respectively, which both number roughly 5,000 seats. Different arenas, different capacities, sure, but fact remains: Indiana leaves money on the table in the form of gameday revenues to maintain one of the most robust student sections in the country.
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And that student section, which can make Assembly Hall one of the most intimidating atmospheres in college basketball, has been painfully underfilled in the last two years. Tickets are still selling, but at gametime, students stay home.
It’s hard to blame them. This season marks the 10-year anniversary of Indiana’s last Big Ten championship. In that time and including that season, the Hoosiers have been to the NCAA tournament just three times, and they’ve played out of the first weekend only once.
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Their three tournament exits have come by 15, 29 and 16 points.
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In that same stretch, IU is just 96-97 in Big Ten play. This program is locked in a wrestling match with average and lately, it is losing.
“History and tradition have carried us a long way with our students that’s led to some waning results in student enthusiasm,” IU associate athletic director Jeremy Gray told IndyStar. “In the past, we could expect support. Now we’ve got to go ask for it, and we’re doing it.”
This comes at a precarious moment.
College football is outrunning college basketball in popularity, financial strength and political influence. The former will influence far more about the future of college athletics, a trend manifesting itself locally.
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It has not been lost on university leaders how football became so popular so quickly, the minute fans were given a reason, in a place where the sport had long been perceived as a hopeless enterprise. This year, for the first time in its history, IU capped its student section in Memorial Stadium (11,000 tickets) and sold every last one.
DeVries, whose brother Jared played at Iowa and in the NFL, will understand the value of a robust football program. It can be the rising tide that lifts all boats in a modern athletic department.
Those boats don’t tend themselves, though. To torture the metaphor through to conclusion, Indiana has allowed too many holes to go unplugged for too long.
The program has not engaged enough with its fan base, outside of individual NIL opportunities. Its coaches have in recent years become increasingly isolated and aloof to the university community more widely. Reflecting a sport-wide trend, roster churn inflated by the transfer portal makes it more difficult for fans to connect with teams, year on year.
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For a long time, its history shielded Indiana from such disconnect. That’s no longer the case. And nowhere — arguably — is that better illustrated than in a student body increasingly displaying its disillusion with its basketball program through poor attendance.
Hence the busy October.
“It’s very important for the health of our basketball program to make sure we have one of the best student sections in college basketball,” Gray said. “There have been some struggles in recent years with that. We think public events like this reconnect our players with our fan base.”
DeVries has been front-foot about this since the fall semester started.
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He and his staff helped students move into their dorms in August. He’s taken multiple speaking engagements around Bloomington this fall. He made an appearance at Homefield Apparel’s new shop on Kirkwood near the start of football season, an appearance for which he arrived early and stayed late.
“We’re at a place where basketball is incredibly important — Indiana basketball is incredibly important — to a lot of people,” DeVries said. “We want people to feel like they’re not watching from afar. We want them to feel like they’re right on the inside, and they’re stride by stride with us as we go through it.”
DeVries did not create this problem. But it’s up to him to solve it.
For a long, long time, IU counted on its history to bring fans back, and on the belief that winning would cure all ills eventually. No one is taking that laissez-faire approach any longer.
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“That type of support doesn’t happen everywhere,” DeVries said. “We have it here.”
The key difference now is the Hoosiers need to go get it. That’s why you’ll see them on Kirkwood come Thursday night.
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This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana basketball fans meet team, regain trust under Darian DeVries
