Hansen's Notebook: If in-person attendance is worth anything, Arizona Wildcats fans again the Pac-12's best

The Star's longtime columnist on the Arizona Wildcats again leading the Pac-12 in all-sport attendance, UA's connections to the U.S. Olympic swim trials, this year's impressive Arizona sports Hall of Fame class, absurd keep-up-with-the-joneses spending in SEC country and more. 

UA fans push Cats to Pac-12 lead in all-sport attendance, but Big 12 towns know the drill  

Arizona was rarely seen as a Pac-12 anchor school, rarely considered the "cool campus'' in the conference, and didn't have a Heisman Trophy winner, a Rose Bowl or a link to Nike's Phil Knight to draw wandering eyeballs or network TV cameras.

But in the end, Arizona was the undisputed leader in community popularity, an unabashed college town that drew more fans than anyone in the Pac-12.

In the just-completed 2023-24 season, Arizona drew a league-best 823,232 fans to the seven sports that regularly charge admission: football, men's and women's basketball, baseball, softball, soccer and volleyball.

Here are the final numbers for the Top 5:

• Arizona: 823,232.

• Washington: 740,374.

• Oregon: 733,288.

• ASU: 712, 282.

• Utah: 689,640.

The ASU and Utah numbers are a bit misleading. ASU played eight home football games in 2023, two more than Arizona. Subtract those two games and the Sun Devils drew roughly 615,000.

Utah is the league's one true gymnastics power; the Utes drew 51,806 to home gymnastics meets, but even if you add that to Utah's seven core sports, its total is 714,011, more than 100,000 paying customers below Arizona. (Four Pac-12 teams do not sponsor gymnastics).

The Wildcats led the Pac-12 in attendance for men's basketball (230,268), women's basketball (110,000), softball (59,430) and baseball (107,379).

Leading the Pac-12 in total attendance is an impressive accomplishment if for no other reason than football-strong Washington drew 481,698 to seven games at Husky Stadium. That dwarfed Arizona's 283,920 (in one fewer game), but the Huskies had little support for any other sport.

No one refers to the Huskies as a school in a college town. The same is true for USC, UCLA, Stanford, Cal and ASU.

When Arizona moves to the Big 12 this fall, competition to be the league leader in attendance will intensify significantly. College towns with strong fan support thrive in the Big 12.

Here's how the returning Big 12 schools ranked in attendance for the seven core sports, 2023-24:

BYU: 859,404.

Iowa State: 841,509.

Oklahoma State: 754,610.

Two things about Iowa State: It does not sponsor baseball, so I substituted wrestling; it drew 40,141 in six home meets. The Cyclones are not a national brand, but they outdrew Arizona in both football (362,304) and men's basketball (249,620).

Who knew?

The BYU factor shouldn't be news to those who have followed the Cougars since they were a WAC rival with Arizona. The Cougars drew 283,317 for men's basketball, or 53,000 more than McKale Center. And I didn't include BYU's impressive attendance for men's volleyball (87,443) because only three Pac-12 schools sponsor men's volleyball.

Here's the bottom line: Arizona's Big 12 road games will likely be played in front of significantly larger crowds than those in the Pac-12, especially men's basketball. Gulp. As impressive as it has been for Adia Barnes’ club to climb to the lead in Pac-12 women's basketball attendance, Iowa State drew 150,107 for women's hoops this year, 40,000 more than Arizona at McKale.

Arizona led the Pac-12 in men's basketball attendance the last 39 seasons. This year it would've been fourth in the Big 12.

Buckle up.

Olympic swimming trials no longer a Tucson festival

From 1996 to 2012, I was fortunate to cover the U.S. Olympic Swimming Trials in Omaha, Indianapolis and Long Beach, five week-long assignments that overflowed with Frank Busch’s UA swimming standouts.

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It was a reporter's dream.

When I arrived in Omaha for the 2008 Trials, there were 42 Tucson-connected swimmers in the meet. Big names, All-Americans, such as Amanda Beard, Lacey Nymeyer, Lara Jackson, Adam Ritter, Marcus Titus and Whitney Myers. And that didn't include 12 UA swimmers who had already qualified for the Olympics for their (non-U.S.) countries such as Albert Subirats, Simon Burnett, Ryk Neethling and Jean Basson.

The Tucson Ford Dealers Swim Club was No. 2 nationally in Olympic Trials competitors, trailing the Texas Aquatics Club and no one else.

Alas, times have changed. After Busch left Tucson to become director of the USA National Swimming Teams in 2011, fewer and fewer Wildcats were Olympic hopefuls. When the Trials began this weekend in Indianapolis, the UA had just nine swimmers among the 1,007 listed on the psyche sheet.

Only one of those swimmers, UA sophomore-to-be Haakon Naughton, is ranked higher than 41st. Naughton is ranked 21st in the 200 butterfly. Only two make the Olympic team per event. At the Pac-12 men's championships in March, no Wildcat men's swimmer finished in the top two.

It's not that those Wildcats at the Olympic Trials aren't good stories. Junior Beck Parnham, who has qualified to swim the 400 individual medley, spends his summers as head coach for Tucson's Highland Vista Aquatics Club, an eastside facility, working an exhausting schedule that includes his own two-a-day workouts and coaching about 75 young Tucsonans five days a week.

When Parnham returns from Indianapolis, he will join new UA coach Ben Loorz's Wildcat swimmers in an attempt to revive a thin program. Parnham will do this while working to finish his degree in Architectural Engineering. Impressive.

Lalang heads impressive '24 UA Hall of Fame class

Arizona's eight-person Sports Hall of Fame Class of ’24 ranks with any and all of the school's predecessors, dating to the inaugural Class of ’76.

Basketball players Andre Iguodala and Jason Terry combined to score 32,849 points in the NBA. High jumper Nick Ross was a nine-time All-American and 2012 NCAA champion whose top height, 7 feet, 7 inches, is third in the long history of Pac-12 high jumpers. Softball pitcher Kenzie Fowler and shot putter Julie LaBonte were both All-Americans, as was .360-hitting second baseman Bobby Ralston.

But the name that turns my head is Lawi Lalang, who might've been the top distance runner in Pac-12 history, a league that produced Hall of Fame runners such as Galen Rupp, Meb Keflezighi and Arizona national champs Robert Cheseret, Abdi Abdirahman, Marc Davis, Matt Guisto, Aaron Ramirez and Martin Keino.

Get this: Lalang won eight NCAA championships.

More impressively, he graduated from the UA and joined the U.S. Army, gaining American citizenship. He is now a Sergeant, an IT Specialist at the Air Force Academy.

Short stuff: UA football's transfer portal promise, CDO baseball alum Justin Lewis coaching at Iowa State

• Justin Lewis, a member of Canyon del Oro High School's 1994 state championship baseball team, last week was hired as an assistant coach for the Iowa State softball team. Thus, he will be coaching against his hometown school, Arizona; Lewis spent four years helping former UA coach Mike Candrea run his softball camps. Lewis' journey to Iowa State has taken time. Lewis spent nine years as a firefighter in Oro Valley, and then evolved to coaching, an assistant at Central Arizona College and Fresno State and most recently as the head coach at Nicholls State, where he was the 2023 Southland Conference Coach of the Year. ...

• Nogales native and UA grad Joey Rodolfo has had quite a week at the ongoing U.S. Open in Pinehurst, North Carolina. An internationally known sportswear designer and entrepreneur, Rodolfo was asked to commemorate the 25th anniversary of 1999 U.S. Open winner Payne Stewart by designing a men's luxury clothing line to honor the style and grace of Stewart, one of golf's best-dressed golfers of all time. There is a statue of Stewart at Pinehurst Resort. Rodolfo is also involved in a movie that is planned on the ’99 Open champ.

Rodolfo previously was a vice-president of Tommy Bahama sportswear, Callaway Golf sportswear and Cutter & Buck, another high-level clothing firm. You may have seen Rodolfo at McKale Center. He is the well-dressed man who sits in the front row opposite the UA bench. ...

• What has been most impressive about UA football coach Brent Brennan’s first five months on the job has been his ability to profit from the transfer portal. Brennan and his staff, keyed by general manager Gaizka Crowley, have acquired transfers from USC, Oregon, Stanford, Ole Miss, Utah, Miami and San Diego State, among other schools. Those 17 transfers have combined to play 199 football games. That's the preferred way rosters are put together in modern college football. Brennan didn't settle for mid-level transfers from, say, Bowling Green and East Tennessee State. Good move.

Crowley, who was involved in UNLV's recent rise from 2-10 to 9-5, is a Florida State graduate who has a depth of high-quality experience with XOS Digital, also known as Catapult, which helps coaching staff's analysis of their roster and scouting.

• When Minnesota beat Arizona 12-1 in the championship game of the 1956 College World Series, Golden Gopher shortstop Jerry Kindall was named MVP of the CWS. And rightly so. Three days before Minnesota beat Arizona in the title game, Kindall hit for the cycle — single, double, triple and home run — to eliminate Ole Miss and advance.

That news resurfaced Friday when Tennessee's Christian Moore hit for the cycle at the World Series, the first to do so since the UA's Hall of Fame baseball coach, a three-time NCAA championship coach, did so in ’56.

Kindall hit just three home runs that season, but No. 3 was a ninth-inning homer in Omaha. In his nine-year MLB career, Kindall, an avowed singles hitter, hit just 44 home runs. The Star's newspaper account of that game, as well as Wikipedia, says that it was Kindall's 18th home run of the season, but I checked Minnesota's record book and the Golden Gophers' leader that year hit just four homers. Kindall died in Tucson in 2017. ...

• Haley Moore made perhaps the most famous shot in UA golf history, men's or women's. At the 2018 NCAA finals, Moore drained an eight-foot birdie putt to break a tie in a sudden-death playoff and give Arizona the national title over Alabama. Moore went on to win twice on the Cactus Tour, and earn her LPGA Tour card for the 2020 and 2021 seasons, playing in 28 events and earning close to $70,000. She has played in five women's "majors.'' Moore moved back to Tucson recently and accepted a job at Canoa Ranch Golf Club in Green Valley, a first assistant, where she hopes to soon become certified to give lessons. She is 25.

My two cents: $47 million for a golf complex? Alabama, absurdly, says yes

The Big Money game of college athletics never seems to subside. Two months ago, I attended the ribbon cutting at the UA's $14.8 million William M. "Bill'' Clements Golf Complex at Tucson Country Club.

I nodded in agreement when now former UA women's coach Laura Ianello said, "I believe this is the best complex of its kind in college golf.'''

Last week, former Arizona athletic director Greg Byrne released a video of Alabama's new golf complex, a two-story palace built on 170 acres, including a new nine-hole golf course and a golf facility that cost $47 million. Yes, $47 million.

It's the latest keeping-up-with-the-Joneses project in college sports, one that doesn't seem sustainable unless, like SEC powers Alabama, Georgia, LSU and Florida, football revenue makes anything possible.