This might be best placed in another topic but I've been following Lorenzo's recruitment in passing since we offered him last year. I don't know how close we're still recruiting him, but he really blossomed this year and basically carried Lake Forest. Played as an undersized big man at 6'7'. He can pop the occasionally three and does all the dirty work down low as well. I remember reading earlier this year that he wanted to build something on his own instead of going to DePaul like his dad, but i also read recently he took a visit to the campus and will be taking an unofficial at Wisconsin soon. He's personally on my wish list as he seems like a high motor/high character kid who could be a leader for the team down the line.

They're not, but this article is a year old though: http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/hi ... story.html

Blurs says Lorenzo plays like an undersized big man ---OMG !!! Have we not seen enough of that type ?? How about Lorenzo being a regular sized forward ???

A 3 or 4 ???

Brot: He plays the 4 at 6'7. I'm personally okay with Porter recruiting smaller more mobile bigs. Porters teams have had the most success when able to rely these types of post players (Christian/Montel). But I understand the desire for a big time shot blocker/rebounder down low.

Lake Forest does a pretty good job with forwards (at least recently).

Last year, Evan Boudreaux (6'8", 220 lb) committed to Dartmouth. He averaged 17.7 ppg and 9.4 rpg on a terrible team. Seems like Edwards is of a similar mold.

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Cigarboy sucks!

If I had to guess, I'd say he's not coming to Loyola. Grumblings around campus are that he has been EXTREMELY disappointed with the crowds at games. That's the kind of thing that will continue to keep players from committing here.

In fact, when the current AD came in, he asked ALL athletes what they want to change. The first thing they all said (regardless of sport) is that they want more people at their games.

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Cigarboy sucks!

I agree. Like with Michael Smith, there doesn't seem to be much momentum behind this one.

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MBB Scholarship Chart

Moser works these guys hard, so there's that. Unfortunately, no one wants to play in a half (or mostly) empty gym.

We all need to do our part to increase attendance. That's a big factor for these kids.

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Cigarboy sucks!

What can we do to increase attendance? A lot of that is on the athletic department

It's all on the athletic department. Every bit of it.

The men's volleyball team won two consecutive national championships and the men's basketball team won 24 games including the CBI Championship. The women's basketball team has a Hall of Famer as coach. And the BEST home attendance we had this year was 3473 for the Saturday afternoon men's basketball game against Creighton--- roughly 77% of capacity. We had 16 home men's basketball games, and only FOUR of them drew more than 2000. Our TOP conference game attendance was 2925 against last place Drake. We couldn't even draw that much against Wichita State, when it was obvious they had maybe a quarter of the fans rooting for them.

The LARGEST women's basketball attendance of the year was 536, even as the team challenged for the top spots for most of the conference season and beat #16 DePaul on the road. The average home attendance of 348 this year is less than a quarter of the average league home attendance of 1429 (a figure partly dragged down by our miserable attendance).

We're in a league now where we have All Americans like VanVleet and Baker playing us at Gentile, where some of our conference games are against ranked opponents, where 22% of our conference opponents are in the NCAA tournament. We're playing 1/3 of our conference games against in-state opponents-- Illinois State, Bradley, and SIU-- and we can't get our students and alumni engaged in a rivalry against those schools?

I still don't see much athletics-focused advertising for us. All the ads we have are focused on academics and location (Chicago), with very little focused on the student experience which includes athletics. I still haven't heard a single ad promoting our back to back men's volleyball national championships. We need to update our in-game ads (Varsity Club, etc.) because they're outdated. We need to promote being in the MVC-- I wonder if 50% of our students could tell you what conference we're in.

As for alumni, perhaps the decades of neglect have made them a lost cause. Since our team has been under-promoted, under-performing, and largely irrelevant from 1987 or so through 2012 or so, maybe we're better off not trying to teach alumni between 25-50 to suddenly take up the habit of supporting athletics. If you haven't noticed, we mostly have alumni and fans 50+ in the stands at our games-- these are the folks who kept following us despite our decent into irrelevance in the 90s and 2000s. And the grim reaper attracts more of them away from us every year.

What we really need is bodies in the seats. Loud and active bodies in the seats gives us a good game-day experience. A good game-day experience leads to bigger crowds, which helps our teams perform better, which helps our scheduling, our recruiting, and won-loss record. It shouldn't be such a confounding conundrum to fill a 4500-seat arena at a school with 15,000 students and 150,000 Chicago-area alumni-- in a city with more than 2 million people just within 15 miles.