Indiana coach works to attract a fan base

By TIM MAY

The last time Ohio State played at Indiana, Bill Lynch was there. He knew the score.

The 41-10 final in favor of Ohio State? Yes, that also.

But what stood out just as much to anyone in attendance was the way the capacity crowd of more than 52,000 made the Buckeyes feel right at home. ‘O-H’ came from one end of Memorial Stadium, followed by ‘I-O’ from the other.

The chant was reprised time and again as Ohio State fans declared squatters’ rights in the stands. By conservative estimate, there seemed to be at least as many OSU backers there as Hoosier rooters.

With the exception of a couple of games in the 1980s and ’90s when Bill Mallory was the IU coach, it had become tradition for OSU fans to become the vocal force, what with Bloomington just a four-hour drive from Columbus, and with Indiana fans and students seemingly apathetic about their sometimes pathetic football team.

Terry Hoeppner set about changing both the team’s fortunes and that home atmosphere when he was hired away from Miami (Ohio) as head coach in 2005. He brought in former Ball State head coach Lynch to help him.

When Hoeppner died of brain cancer in 2007 and Lynch was named his successor, Lynch kept working the cause. That’s because he remembered that Memorial Stadium atmosphere for the OSU game in 2005, and many of the other home games since.

“Absolutely it has to change,” Lynch said this summer. “As we went around on the spring and summer tours speaking to groups, we talked about that.”

He didn’t just talk about it to the media. He took the cause on the road, especially this year as the Hoosiers celebrate the opening of the NEZ, the North End Zone Facility they built to provide more meeting, office, weight-training and academic support services for their athletes to help the program keep up with the OSUs and Michigans.

“The Big Ten Network has been good to us, and we’ve got three night games at home which I think will help our home-game atmosphere,” Lynch said.

One of those opportunities comes Saturday, when the Hoosiers (3-1, 0-1), coming off a last-minute loss at Michigan, play host to No.9 Ohio State (3-1, 1-0) at 7 p.m. in a Big Ten Network telecast.

“It is going to be a great opportunity for us to showcase our fans, and our stadium, and Indiana football,” Lynch said. “The best way to do that is to make sure our fans are the ones who are in there.”

Toward that end, Lynch spent time at dorms, and at fraternity and sorority houses on the IU campus the past half year, drumming support from what he thinks should be the more ardent of fans.

“The first area we’re trying to connect with is the student body,” Lynch said. “We’ve got 38,000 students on campus, and we’ve got to create a culture where going to the football game on Saturdays is the thing to do.”

Evidently it paid off. The student season ticket sales topped 6,000 for the first time since 2006, IU announced a few weeks ago. But it points to one of the major differences between the Lynch job description, where he has to build a program and help sell tickets, and that of, say, OSU coach Jim Tressel, whose major task is keeping a football juggernaut in fine working order.

“No question, we have to approach it differently from Ohio State,” Lynch said. “Fred Glass, our new athletics director, and his staff have worked very hard in this area, of thinking outside the box.

“We have to create a little different game-day experience. Ohio State football is its own game-day experience — when you have 90,000 for the spring game, that’s 90,000 people who love watching Ohio State football. So we’ve got to do some things to build that.”