Midnight Madness will start things right
This column represents the views of the Old Gold and Black Editorial Board.

In the few short weeks since the student body returned to campus in August, new Head Men’s Basketball Coach Skip Prosser has been witness to three significant changes designed to return the basketball team to the hands of the students and inspire more school spirit. Following a revamped ticket policy and a proposal to rearrange student seating in the Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum is the return of Midnight Madness to campus for the first time since 1996.

Midnight Madness, a mainstay at other ACC schools, is essentially a big party that officially kicks off the basketball team’s season. The coaching staff, the department of athletics and Student Government have been working together to coordinate the event. Ultimately, the goal of Midnight Madness is to bring the basketball team and the students together, thereby inspiring greater student support for the team.
Prosser has already taken the initiative to meet with a collection of student leaders before classes had even begun to discuss his proposed changes for seating arrangements in the Joel. Prosser proposed the change in student seating in Joel so that students would be seated behind the opposing team’s second-half basket, rather than behind the Deacon bench. Each of these moves are designed to create an ideal home court advantage and to improve the atmosphere in the Joel for students.

Since Prosser’s arrival, a new student ticket distribution policy has also been proposed. The first 1,700 students with an athletic pass and a student ID will be seated in the lower level, and later arrivals will be seated in the upper level. Students will also be allowed to move from the upper level to the lower level if seats are empty five minutes before the start of the game. During the higher-profile games of spring semester, students will receive tickets during a traditional pickup, but pickup may move from Spry Soccer Stadium to a more central location to make it more of a campus event. These changes are specifically intended to make the process of ticket pickup easier, to provide students with better seating and to encourage higher student turnout for all games, not just those against Duke and Carolina.

Prosser is taking the initiative to involve students in every possible aspect of the basketball team, but it is up to the students to take full advantage of this opportunity. Students should get started by voting on the proposed ticket distribution policy at deacontix@hotmail.com, showing up at Midnight Madness and making every effort to attend as many games as possible this season. This university is small compared to other ACC schools, but it is still possible for students to create an atmosphere of support for the basketball team similar to those found at Duke or North Carolina. Thanks in part to the team’s sporadic success of the past few years, Demon Deacon supporters – and students in particular – have been perceived as fair-weather fans. They have a bad habit of coming out in full support of the team in the beginning of the season, but drifting away once the team slips into a skid. Prosser’s arrival on campus has energized student leaders and al Demon Deacon fans to the point where they are taking active roles in supporting the athletics department of their own volition.
If the charismatic Prosser can coach as well as he can manage the politics of college basketball, the Deacs should be in for a winning season, and could perhaps even witness their head coach garner a few coach of the year trophies. It is clear that Prosser’s first priority is the students of this university, and what they want to see from their basketball team. In Prosser’s eyes, the team does not belong only to the alumni or to the fans in Winston-Salem and beyond – it belongs, first and foremost, to the students on whom he is counting on to take an active interest in the team.