Football Attendance Highest Since 2019 in Fall Weekend Victory

William Friedman ’28

Contributing Writer

With Trinity’s campus packed with parents and alumni for Fall Weekend 2024, the Bantam’s week seven victory over Bowdoin College drew a crowd of 5,500 fans on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. This sized crowd is uncommon for NESCAC competition, as the Bantam faithful’s efforts in support of their team this weekend led to the most attended conference game of 2024 so far. Despite Trinity having only the fifth highest enrollment among the 10 NESCAC schools with football teams, no other school has drawn a crowd within a thousand fans of this Saturday’s output in Hartford. The crowd was large not only by 2024 conference standards, but it was significant historically as well. Since the pandemic season in 2020, no Trinity football game had attracted this level of attendance. 

Throughout the season as a whole, the Bantams have shown up in relatively high numbers, although this weekend was a significant spike. Leading up to this weekend, Tufts University drew the highest single game crowd with 4,322 fans watching their victory over Bowdoin, and Wesleyan University accumulated the highest attendance per home game, with 3,019 fans on average at their first three contests in Middletown. Tufts is second in this category. Tufts and Wesleyan have student populations ranking first and second in the NESCAC respectively, so these figures should not come as a surprise. Through six weeks, Wesleyan led the conference in attendance per student, with an average attendance standing at 98% of their student population. Tufts, on the other hand, only attracted a crowd equal to 43.5% of their nearly 7,000 undergraduates. Thanks to this weekend’s efforts, Trinity now has a comfortable lead in home attendance per student, with 113.9% as many fans as students on average this season. 

Trinity and Wesleyan both have strong teams this year, but outside of Connecticut, team success does not appear to correlate strongly with attendance. The third, fourth, fifth and sixth place teams in terms of attendance per student are the ninth, seventh, eighth and tenth best football teams in the conference respectively (Bowdoin, Amherst, Bates, Hamilton). Middlebury and Tufts, the conference’s two 5-2 teams thus far, are 6th and 8th in attendance per student, and Williams and Colby are second to last and last despite being middle-of-the-pack when it comes to success on the field. So while the Bantam’s success in recent years and their 4-0 record in Hartford this year surely doesn’t hurt attendance, it appears not to be the only factor, and student enthusiasm and favorable Connecticut weather this fall combine to help create the strong atmosphere on game days we have appreciated so far. 

After winning this week and enjoying a Bates victory over the previously 5-1 Middlebury Panthers, the Bantams share the conference lead with Wesleyan at 6-1 each, with 5-2 Middlebury and 5-2 Tufts only able to hope a first place team slips up in week 8 and leaves room for one of them to steal the title. But unless Amherst upsets Trinity or Williams upsets Wesleyan, week nine will be simple in determining the conference champion: whoever wins the matchup between Trinity and Wesleyan will take home the outright championship banner. Although the NESCAC does not have an official postseason title game like some other conferences, it is probable that Nov. 9 will serve as the conference championship game in effect. Trinity will continue the quest for their third consecutive banner in these final two weeks, while Wesleyan has never won an outright championship, and this would be their first banner since splitting the title three ways in 2013 with Amherst and Middlebury. The game will be played in Hartford, the lone remaining home game following this weekend’s record crowd. With the stakes as high as they are shaping up to be, and the support for Trinity football at an all time high, our next home game projects to draw another large and passionate group of supporters. 

Note: There is no data for this year’s game between Middlebury and Bowdoin. All 34 other NESCAC games have published attendance records.