Valpo Basketball is Cool Again
Column: What seemed unreachable is once again alive inside the Athletics-Recreation Center
I wasn’t sure if the Athletics-Recreation Center would feel quite like it did on Wednesday night ever again.
Count me among the doubters.
Not after Bryce Drew left. Not after Valpo left the Horizon League. Not after COVID. Not after the transfer portal hitting Valparaiso time and time again, even prior to NIL. Not after the school dropped Crusaders for a lighthouse. Not after the local media ditched covering Valpo athletics, leading me to launch The Victory Bell.
Not after the Beacons have been the laughingstock of the Missouri Valley Conference for nine years.
Roger Powell Jr. returned to Valparaiso in the spring of 2023 just seven years after leaving to be an assistant at Vanderbilt under Bryce. He went from Nashville to Spokane when he became an assistant at Gonzaga. We stayed in contact through the years, including sitting down for a long interview at the 2023 NCAA tournament in Denver. Little did I know that a month later he’d be hired to replace Matt Lottich at Valpo.
In the days leading up to Powell’s hiring, he asked me what kind of program he might be walking into. I told him the truth. The years of 3,000-plus crowds at the ARC were over. They were replaced by years of apathy.
He took it, processed it, and told me on more than one occasion he had big plans for Valpo if his path led him back to Northwest Indiana.
I wasn’t so sure.
I was in denial for a long time. I didn’t want to believe Valparaiso had fallen on such hard times. I didn’t want to believe school spirit had seemingly faded when Gen Z replaced the Millennials on Valpo’s campus.
It happened slowly, then suddenly.
Valparaiso fans came out in droves at the turn of the century, averaging an attendance figure of 4,530 during the 2001-02 season. That number dipped under 3,000 seven years later when Valpo went 9-22. Bryce Drew brought a spike in attendance during his first year as head coach, with an average of 3,383 passing through the gates in 2011-12. That figure jumped to 3,573 in 2015-16, the year Valpo set the program record for wins, culminating with a record-setting 5,444 fans at the ARC for a NIT quarterfinal win over St. Mary’s. It was Powell’s final game on staff as an assistant.
The first big decrease came the following year in Lottich’s first season at the helm. Attendance dipped by nearly 500 per game from the previous season, but a large part could be chalked up to not having the NIT boost in attendance. Still, despite Alec Peters returning for his senior year, Valpo averaged just 3,086 fans per game. The number hovered around 2,800 over the next three years as the program began to fall on hard times, including back-to-back losing seasons for just the second time since the early 1990s.
If attendance was gradually slipping following Drew’s departure, it fell off a cliff after COVID. Valparaiso averaged 2,797 fans in 2019-20 before Lottich led the team on an improbable run to the Arch Madness title game. Fans weren’t really allowed at the ARC during the 2020-21 year and by the time things were “back to normal” the following season, Valpo’s once fervent fanbase had suddenly shrunk. Attendance dipped to 1,758 in 2021-22 and then 1,625 in Lottich’s final season the following year.
By the time Powell took over in 2023-24, attendance had fallen inside of 1,500 before cratering at an average of 1,389 fans per game last season. In just over 20 years, Valpo lost nearly 70 percent of its average attendance.
One of the biggest dips came in the student section. When I was in college (1999-2002), it was normal to arrive an hour before tip if you wanted a seat in the student section. To be clear, the idea of sitting didn’t really exist in the “VUCru.” We stood. When the school shifted away from referring to itself as VU, the “Valparaizone” arrived. That gave way “The Gold Zone,” a short-lived name that was finally replaced by the simple “Valparaiso Student Section.” The signage for the latest name was quietly removed earlier this season.
There could be any number of factors for the gradual erasure of the student section. A struggling team. Declining enrollment. A growing number of commuter students. COVID. A new roster every year. The ability to stream Valpo games, but more likely, the ability to stream other games, making it less likely students adopted a new favorite team over their childhood favorites.
There was a glimmer in 2021, but not for the men’s basketball team. The volleyball team hosted the NIVC championship game and the student section was packed for the first time in years. That night at the ARC proved Valparaiso students would support their teams if there was a winner on the court. It would be five years until that came to fruition for the men’s basketball program.
Powell did his best to get students engaged. His first year back on campus was filled with visits to residence halls, fraternity events and anything else that might increase student engagement. He invited the entire campus to an event at the ARC where the students could be part of the 2023-24 intro video. Few showed. He tried again the following year to the same result.
This season didn’t start much better for the Beacons. Valparaiso drew less than 1,000 fans for home games against Nicholls and Bryant. The students that showed up did so with little more than a passing curiosity. Full rows in the student section went unused. Boredom and doom-scrolling were more common than cheering, regardless of the on-court product.
Beneath the surface there was a change occurring. Much like the decrease in attendance, it came slowly and then suddenly.
The football team started showing up. The swim team made a memorable appearance. The baseball team carried over their enthusiasm from attending volleyball matches and took their place at the front of the student section. With student-athletes now making up nearly 20 percent of Valparaiso’s enrollment, it was no small feat that the men’s basketball team was starting to win over their peers and they did it in the simplest of ways. They didn’t act above anyone.
“The biggest thing is that we actually interact with the students off the court,” Valparaiso freshman Rakim Chaney said. “In class, we talk to them at lunch. We sit with the football team and baseball team and the swim team. We actually speak with those kids and we hang out with those kids. We have a real relationship with them where they’re going to come to our game and we’re going to get to their games, win or lose, and that’s just the support we need around athletics to continue to grow.”
The vibes started to flip on a Friday night in early February when Valparaiso needed overtime to beat Evansville. The Beacons were struggling against the last-place Purple Aces, but a jolt went through the ARC when Christian Hack, a member of the baseball team, won $10,000 by hitting a half-court shot. The student section mobbed Hack on the court and Valpo used the energy to turn the tables. The electricity in the building was palpable.
The Beacons went on the road and beat Drake. Never mind the fact the Bulldogs are down this year, but beating the defending Missouri Valley Conference champions on the road signaled something the students took note of. This Valpo team had something going for it.
When the Beacons returned to the ARC a week later, attendance topped 2,000 for the first time in nearly two years. Brody Whitaker knocked down a game-winning jumper against Indiana State with 8.8 seconds remaining and the students stormed the court. Three days later, a win against Bradley brought more students spilling onto the floor. The Beacons stormed the student section after JT Pettigrew’s game-winning 3-pointer on Wednesday night before the party shifted to the court for a postgame prayer.
While these scenes are now becoming commonplace inside the ARC, opposing Valley fanbases aren’t all feeling the good vibes.
Sure, storming the court against a struggling Indiana State team is a bit of a stretch in a vacuum. Continuing to do so in the next two home games might have rubbed people the wrong way, but when put against the backdrop of the last decade, it represented much more than a trio of conference wins in February. It was Valparaiso men’s basketball reborn again.
Valley fans have been picking on Valparaiso and its presence in the conference for years. Slamming the ARC. Slamming fan attendance at Arch Madness. Slamming Beacon and Blaze. Slamming the inability to retain top players and lack of NIL resources. I’ve grown so sick of these insults, particularly when they come from fanbases that haven’t won anything themselves. Some are seemingly coming around.
There’s a rich men’s basketball history at Valparaiso. Those banners don’t hang from the ARC rafters by accident, even if they are largely ignored by opposing fans today.
Powell had a vision for the program when he returned to Valparaiso three years ago. He wanted to set the foundation in his first year. He did that and even found individual success with Cooper Schwieger and Isaiah Stafford. They both returned for a second year at Valpo, although Stafford was sidelined by injury. All Wright emerged in his place and he very well might have returned for a second year if not for a breakout performance in St. Louis last March.
Powell was forced back to the drawing board for his third year, but this was always the year he had in mind to make Valparaiso competitive.
Entering the final weekend of the season hoping to get a bye is not something that would’ve been celebrated in the Mid-Con or the Horizon League, but it’s a monumental achievement for a program that was picked last in the Valley. Making a deep run at Arch Madness is the next step. Getting the campus community to return next season is another. Getting the bulk of this roster to return next season is another.
The story of this season, and how it will be remembered, is still being written, but a large chapter is how this group of Beacons made Valpo basketball cool again.
“It means I’m doing what I said I was going to come here to do,” Powell said. “That’s something I take pride in. We can’t say that we haven’t hit our roadblocks, but a lot of coaches can complain and get discouraged. I have a strong faith in God and my work ethic and my staff. I knew it would take some time to find the right formula and nucleus of guys that I believed would embody Valpo. We got it.”
“I knew the first year was going to be hard, the second year I thought we had it, but obviously we lost a lot guys. I thought the third and fourth year we could be competitive for a .500 season, but these guys have blown that out of the water. We lost everybody, we took a step back, but with these guys we took a major step forward. I’m excited and thankful for the opportunity. There’s a lot of pride in my heart, and a lot of grit with it. Valpo basketball needs to be cool. Homer Drew and Scott and Bryce, Bryce gave me my opportunity here. We won a lot championships here. This has some tradition and it means something to me personally. That’s why I came back and it’s a blessing to be able to restore it a little bit.”
(Photos courtesy of Valpo Athletics)