UNLV Hoops Team Wins First Two Conference Games in Front of Small Crowds at Thomas & Mack Center
By ALAN SNEL
LVSportsBiz.com
They’re a young group of college basketball players with their best man sidelined with an injury for the rest of the season, but UNLV’s hoops team is off a 2-0 start in conference play for the first time in 13 years after Mountain West wins over weak teams Colorado State and then Wyoming Saturday night.
Crowds are still small at Thomas and Mack Center, though. Saturday’s crowd was formally declared at 7,903 even though the actual number of bodies in the building looked like it was closer to half that announced total.
It might seem counter-intuitive, but the UNLV sports department is holding its own in the sponsorship category with a variety of traditional big-name sponsors like Findlay car dealerships, personal injury lawyer Ed Bernstein and Chevron and new ones like DC Solar and Tough Turtle Turf.
Dan Dolby, general manager of Learfield’s UNLV Sports Properties, had told LVSportsBiz.com that his UNLV Learfield team has signed up 20 new sponsors to bring the sponsor roster to about 100 this past year and that they don’t use the football and basketball teams’ records to sign up new sponsors.
In fact, the Learfield UNLV Sports Properties sponsors are a varied lot from Valley Bank of Nevada and Nevada State Bank to TV Channel 5 in Las Vegas and PF Chang restaurant at Running Reb basketball games at Thomas & Mack Center.
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Radio personality Chet Buchanan has returned to UNLV to pump up the basketball crowds at TMC games, urging the fans to stand up and clap for the Rebels fight song. He tries the best he could to stoke the small crowd that included many families and kids along with old-time UNLV hoops fans.
What was missing, however, were the students at the on-campus venue that used to rock back in the day when UNLV’s basketball team used to make the Final Four in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
UNLV is off to New Mexico Tuesday to play the Lobos at The Pit. New Mexico is fresh off a major upset of previously undefeated Nevada Reno.
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