Change of Venue

The DePaul Blue Demons, my alma mater, lost to Providence at home Friday night by a score of 71-64.  The box score didn’t include attendance at the new Wintrust Arena.  Oh, for the days of Alumni Hall.

Once upon a time, DePaul students could walk to a men’s basketball game from class or the library or the dorm.  But Alumni Hall only seated 5,300 people, and my alma mater had visions of going bigtime like Marquette or Duke, even.  So, the men split for suburban Rosemont and the Allstate Arena in 1980. 

The only problem was that venue had all the intimacy of an airplane hangar.  A Tribune columnist speculated yesterday that the Northwestern men’s basketball team may be underperforming in part because they’re playing home games this season at “dank Allstate Arena” while Welsh-Ryan Arena, NU’s Alumni Hall, undergoes renovation.  Maybe I should mention here that Allstate is miles and miles away from the Northwestern campus in Evanston.

DePaul men’s basketball no longer calls the dank hangar home.  Both the men’s and women’s teams now play in the publicly subsidized Wintrust Arena.  It’s more intimate than Allstate with a capacity of just over 10,000 vs. 17,000-plus, but it’s seven miles away from the main campus, on Chicago’s South Side.  Only DePaul is a North Side school, the main campus part and parcel of the Lincoln Park neighborhood.    Expecting students to take the “L” to Wintrust, while feasible, is hardly more realistic than it was expecting them to find their way to Rosemont.

Which brings us to Loyola University.  The Ramblers play at Gentile Arena (capacity 4,500), on campus; I pass it every time I cut through Loyola on my bike going to Evanston.  Funny how it reminds me of Alumni Hall.