Home Sweet Home?

As a small, private school competing mainly against large, state-run institutions, Wake Forest and its basketball team are at a decided disadvantage when compared to the other ten members of the ACC.
From recruiting to fundraising to merchandise sales, it's hard for Wake to keep up with bigger schools and thus makes sustaining a big-time basketball program infinitely more difficult.
This discrepancy is never more apparent then when the Deacs play a game at Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum, their off-campus home since 1989.
Wake’s small enrollment (3,600) is dwarfed by the size of their home coliseum (14,400), which makes for a 4:1 arena/student ratio (no other ACC school has even a 1:1 ratio).
Coupled with a largely apathetic Winston-Salem community, the sparse crowds that greeted the Demon Deacons in years past shouldn’t have been a surprise.
However, things have changed at The Joel this year. Last season’s run to the Sweet 16 and this year’s massive preseason hype invigorated both students and townies alike. Now Lawrence Joel is packed for every game and the atmosphere, once tranquil, is frenzied.
For the first time ever, Wake Forest truly has a home-court advantage.

Lawrence Joel Coliseum is an all-purpose arena, designed as much for the concerts, rodeos and circuses that frequent the venue as it was for Wake Forest basketball.
As a result, the arena has always had a sterile feel that wasn’t helped by thousands of empty seats on game day.
Even when the arena was packed (as it was during the Tim Duncan years and the two games per season against UNC and Duke), the atmosphere was never all that great. Poor placement of the student section (behind the basket, extending towards the side of the court without the benches) ensured that.
When Skip Prosser took over for Dave Odom in 2000, his first order of business was to move the student section, a difficult endeavor since the city of Winston-Salem dictates where the Wake students sit. After some negotiating, Prosser got the student seats moved over a few sections so that they were still behind the basket, but were now on the side of the opposing teams bench. This move endeared Prosser to the Wake student body and helped out his team as well, since the students were now behind the opposing team’s basket in the second half and could get loud and rowdy during free throws and big possessions.
Prosser’s change helped a lot, yet even with a team firmly entrenched in Top 25 and the ACC Player of the Year (Josh Howard) on the court, Lawrence Joel still didn’t have “it”.
I remember going to a game against UVA during my junior year with my friend Scott. It was a Sunday night game on Fox Sports Net between two teams ranked in the Top 25 (Wake was in the Top 10 while UVA was hovering around #20), yet Scott and I had the entire upper-deck to ourselves. Granted, the upper deck at The Joel is a terrible place to watch a game and no students should have had to sit up there, but this was a huge game with major ACC ramifications... It should have been packed, but it wasn't.
The only time the Coliseum was filled was when Duke and Carolina came to town. (The students would come en masse to the Duke games (even the non-basketball fans in the student body knew the importance of beating Duke) while Carolina fans would buy up the tickets for that contest.)
When my cousins came down from Maryland during my senior year to watch the defending NCAA champions play a Wake team in the Top 10 and saw a good deal of empty seats in the Joel, they were shocked. Cole Field House was sold out for games against Drexel and Wake couldn’t fill up their place for the defending champs?
But, with the small student body it was tough to do.
That’s why the changes this year at Lawrence Joel have been so remarkable.

For each Wake home game this year, there have been almost 2,500 students in attendance, which is about 70% of the enrollment. I don't need to tell you how unbelievable that is.
The townies, in true fair-weather fan fashion, have snatched up all the remaining tickets, meaning that LJVMC has been filled to the rafters for each game this season.
The attendance, in itself, isn’t what is so surprising. In year’s past Wake's success wasn't predicted, so they weren’t able to build a big following. With all the hype this year, it was easy to market the team, hence the sellouts.
No, what shocks me isn’t the attendance, but it how the atmosphere at The Joel has done a complete 180.
Even when Lawrence Joel would be sold out for those Duke games a few years ago, it still wasn’t an intimidating place to play. Sure, it would get loud on a breakaway dunk or big three-point shot, but that was it. There wasn’t any palpable excitement before the game.
All of that changed when UNC traveled east to Winston earlier this year.
The noise in The Joel was deafening from the opening tip and didn’t let up all game. Dick Vitale and Mike Patrick said it was the loudest they had ever heard the Coliseum and I don’t doubt it.
For the Duke game, the student section was on J.J. Redick from the get-go and they didn’t stop until his final shot rimmed out, giving the Deacs the home-sweep against their Tobacco Road rivals.
Even during contests against Miami and Florida State, the fans were loud throughout the entire game. In the latter game, the crowd was primed for revenge stemming from the Seminoles upset over the Deacs in Tallahassee. Wake got out to an early lead, but the fans didn’t stop cheering or leave early, as they would have in the past.
Wake’s home court is now a tough place to play and that has helped the team immeasurably.
Still, even with their newfound vigor, the Deac fans have a lot of room for improvement. Chanting “Er-ic Will-iams (clap clap clap clap clap)” when the Wake center dunks is lame, but not as lame as doing the same thing for Chris Paul (his name doesn’t really lend itself to a four-syllable chant) after he got into a tussle with the aforementioned Redick.
A “You’ve Got Backne!” or “NBDL” chant would have been more appropriate in that situation, but that’s OK. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
The little game where one side of the arena yells “Wake” while the other side yells “Forest” was fine when there were 10,000 people there and shaking you keychain passed for team spirit, but with boisterous fans and a national television audience, it’s time to retire that one too.
I was impressed yesterday when some Wake students chanted “ECU” to Virginia coach Pete Gillen, a dig at the soon-to-be-fired coach and the vacancy open in Greenville, where Gillen’s former boss Terry Holland is the new AD. That never would have happened in years past.
Is making fun of a coach about to be fired over the line? Maybe, but Wake fans have been so polite over the past few years that they’re entitled to a few suggestive cheers.
As for the tie-dyed t-shirts, I’m not really a fan, but at least they give Wake fans a much-needed identity.

On Wednesday night, the Demon Deacons close out their home schedule against Georgia Tech.
Five years ago such a contest would have been watched by a quiet crowd consisting of a couple hundred students mixed in with 10,000 or so fans. On Wednesday there won’t be an empty seat in the house and the crowd will be anything but quiet as they try to will their Wake Forest team to an undefeated season at home; something that wouldn't have been possible without the changes at Lawrence Joel.