Abstract
Intercollegiate athletics have been struggling to make any sort of revenue despite constant effort to attract students and local residents to attend games. Although there is a large discrepancy between attendance (as well as revenues and budgets) in Division I and Division III athletic contests, all levels of play are continuously looking for tactics to attract more fans to games. In this paper we examine the differences in what motivates people to consume sport contests, whether they choose to stay at home to watch on television, buy a ticket, or simply not watch at all. We will be investigating nonrevenue sports at all different levels and testing what brings people to consume these sports. Data will be collected using a college student sample in both Division I and Division III Universities, and we expect to find which factors lead to their consumption of spectating sports between factors such as empathy, family, skill, entertainment, achievement, drama, and so on. Sport Consumer Motivation scale developed by James and Ross (2004) and Motivation Scale for Sport Consumption (Trail & James, 2001) will be adopted to measure sport fan motivations. A series of Aanalysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) and multiple regression analysis will be utilized to analyze the data. By investigating these underlying motives we will develop a broad sense of understanding for the reason of fan attendance in a different level of intercollegiate athletics. In finding what it is that brings students, fans, and family to sport contests, sport managers and marketers can begin to develop tactics and strategies to draw more people to the game, in an effort to either make revenue or refrain from losing revenue depending on the level and size of the school.
