One month earlier than the beginning of his second season as USC’s basketball coach, Eric Musselman stands on the fringe of the Coliseum tunnel, wearing full soccer uniform and helmet. When his second arrives, the 5-foot-7 coach fees from the tunnel on cue, clad in full Trojan regalia, bursting with power as if it had been gameday.
“Let’s go! Let’s go!” he yells.
Besides, the stadium is empty. USC’s soccer staff is on the street. Musselman takes off his helmet and appears round confused. After which, the digital camera cuts.
The joke lands — even when his teenage daughter, Mariah, would possibly disagree. The video does properly on social media, too. And it’s aggregated on-line with headlines reminiscent of “Muss Posts Another Hilarious Video.” It even will get Lincoln Riley’s consideration.
“Muss is great,” the USC soccer coach stated quickly after. “He does some things I wish I could get myself to do.”
Who is aware of if it can carry even yet one more fan to Galen Middle when USC opens its season in opposition to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo on Monday. However Musselman, who has a whole library of comparable Instagram clips, is happy. After a debut season spent discovering his bearings at USC, the fiery coach made it clear he felt he and his workers didn’t do sufficient to advertise the Trojans’ basketball program. Common attendance at Galen Middle fell to only over 5,000 per evening final season, down from greater than 6,000 within the ultimate 12 months of the Andy Enfield period. An inconsistent marketing campaign and a 17-18 end didn’t assist.
Profitable, in fact, is the best technique to resolve that drawback. Musselman has made clear he understands that. However he has additionally been in L.A. lengthy sufficient to know that successful alone isn’t essentially sufficient.
Latest historical past definitely suggests as a lot. After mounting an Elite Eight run within the pandemic 2020-2021 season, the 2 seasons that adopted noticed the Galen Middle sit greater than half-empty most nights. USC’s finest common attendance over the previous decade was really in Enfield’s ultimate season, even because the staff skidded to a 15-18 end.
With that in thoughts, Musselman began making the movies. It’s additionally why he paid for matcha and free meals for college kids in late August — and received it on video — why he introduced his staff to Venice Seashore for a follow in October — and recorded it — and why he’s hoping to schedule a dunk contest at considered one of USC’s fraternities this fall — which can most definitely be posted on social media.
Musselman has implored gamers to play a component in advertising and marketing this system and themselves. When the staff was invited to his home for a Halloween social gathering final week, he urged the gamers to try to promote the staff whereas they mingled along with his Manhattan Seashore neighbors.
His workers, in the meantime, has spent hours handing out literal flyers on campus, hopeful that it’s going to drum up curiosity.
Not all coaches are so keen to place themselves on the market. And positive, Musselman is aware of some persons are most likely rolling their eyes. However as he sees it, this is part of the job. And it’s a component Musselman is especially properly suited to play.
“It’s not a traditional approach,” he stated. “But we just can’t do things here that are traditional. We have to create uniqueness in our market. If you don’t want any fans, don’t do anything, just coach your team. If you want fans, you’ve gotta win — that’s No. 1. You’ve gotta have star players — that’s No.2. Your style of play matters, that’s No. 3. And you’ve got to connect. I don’t see how you have unbelievable attendance unless you connect with the students.
“That’s just my personal belief being here for a year. And this year, we are drastically different in how we’re trying to connect.”
The topic of how one can join with basketball followers was a daily matter of dialog on the dinner desk for Musselman rising up. Invoice Musselman, a longtime coach in school and the professionals, was a agency believer within the energy of promotion. He felt that his groups had an obligation to entertain. And as coach, it was his accountability to market the staff always.
His dad beloved to debate, whereas teaching at Minnesota within the Seventies, how he turned the Golden Gophers from a staff that couldn’t draw followers to at least one that offered out the adjoining hockey area for overflow seating.
“There was a heavy pride there,” Musselman stated.
At any time when his father took Eric out into public, he normally introduced alongside a field of Minnesota T-shirts at hand out wherever they went. To his fourth-grader son, it was horrifying. However his father at all times instructed him the identical factor.
“It’s a walking billboard,” Musselman stated. “That was his favorite phrase.”
The teachings caught with Musselman. At 23, after he took over as basic supervisor of the Continental Basketball Assn.’s Speedy Metropolis Thrillers; he provided the usage of a automotive to every of the staff’s new gamers. The one catch was that they needed to put an enormous sticker of the Thrillers emblem on the facet door.
USC males’s basketball coach Eric Musselman spins a basketball whereas standing on the Trojans’ basketball court docket.
(Dania Maxwell/Los Angeles Occasions)
Speedy Metropolis was the place Musselman actually honed his advertising and marketing chops. He flew in halftime leisure, arrange recurring bits throughout video games and tried outlandish promotions. One, which poked enjoyable at Michael Jordan’s playing, was featured in USA In the present day and received the staff in sizzling water with the NBA.
But it surely all labored. Quickly sufficient, Speedy Metropolis was promoting out its area. The crowds stored the franchise afloat.
“This guy was always promoting something,” says Pat Corridor, who owned the Thrillers. “He’s the only guy I know who could get more attendance out of raising the price of hot dogs.”
The components labored elsewhere too. As a coach in the US Basketball League, a summer time league based in 1985, Musselman’s Florida Sharks broke attendance information — a reality Musselman knew as a result of he was retaining shut observe.
“No one even came close,” he says.
The identical success in promoting a program adopted him into the faculty ranks. At Nevada, three of his 4 seasons set common attendance information. After Musselman took Arkansas on an Elite Eight run in 2021, this system offered out season tickets for 3 straight seasons. The Razorbacks averaged greater than 19,000 followers per recreation in his ultimate two seasons.
“Every place he’s coached, they fill the arena,” longtime assistant Todd Lee stated.
So it’s attainable the identical may very well be achieved at USC. However the Trojans program brings a novel set of challenges, from competitors for consideration in L.A. to crippling weekday site visitors on the 110.
This season, these challenges have been a serious level of a every day dialogue amongst USC’s workers. Each morning, they meet as a part of a “think tank.” In these conferences, advertising and marketing “carries as much weight as anything else,” Musselman stated.
It’s from these conferences that plans have been hatched for locating USC basketball a brand new foothold in a market the place it has traditionally struggled. However everybody concerned understands that these plans might be futile if USC can’t discover a technique to win.
These efforts weren’t made any simpler when five-star recruit Alijah Arenas severely injured his knee. It was devastating, each on and off the court docket — Musselman noticed Arenas, an area standout and son of a visual former NBA star, as the right participant to advertise this system, just like how JuJu Watkins has promoted the ladies’s program.
“That’s how this stuff gets rolling,” Musselman stated.
It’s nonetheless not clear if Arenas will play this season — or in any respect — at USC. And with out him, USC doesn’t have an apparent star to step into the void. However when Musselman shot that video within the empty Coliseum, Arenas was with him. They even shot a number of takes with Arenas saying a line.
It was the form of advertising and marketing effort Musselman calls for from his gamers. Even when, on this case, Arenas’ half was reduce in put up.
Final week, with the season drawing close to, a crowd of frat brothers flooded onto the follow court docket at Galen Middle. They had been there for USC’s basketball follow on the private request of Musselman, who in return insisted they be a part of the staff’s new pupil part on Monday.
USC’s college students, Musselman firmly believes, are central to constructing this system to its potential. Partly as a result of they don’t should courageous site visitors. But in addition as a result of he is aware of Galen Middle wants an environment and the campus must really feel the thrill — and fraternities, he figures are a wise place to start out for each.
USC head coach Eric Musselman, assistant coach Will Conroy and gamers maintain their fingers in a V for victory signal whereas the USC band performs after their 75-69 victory over Idaho State on Nov. 7, 2024.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Occasions)
Which is how the boys of ZBT ended up right here, capturing after follow alongside the gamers. One among them got here in sporting a jersey of Chad Baker-Mazara, the Trojans’ redshirt senior switch from Auburn.
Musselman stopped follow when he noticed it. He instructed Baker-Mazara to instantly go take an image.
“I never saw one jersey of any of our players last year,” Musselman stated. “I don’t even know how the guy got it.”
For the coach, it was a constructive that his program is pushing in the appropriate course. The query now’s whether or not that effort will really repay.
“I know it’s just 50 people in an arena of thousands,” Musselman stated. “But that’s a small thing that happened today.
“Baby steps.”
