I can’t believe how fast the time has flown by, but the semester is coming to a close — with just a few short weeks until University Park Campus is vacated for the summer. This move-out season is a significant one for Editor in Chief Stefano Fendrich, as it will be the end of his time at USC — if he can come up with the credits, that is. It’s hard to believe that Fendrich won’t be at the 90 on Wednesdays or that “The Great Debate” won’t be in the Daily Trojan on Fridays, but at his ripe age, it’s probably for the best. 

As one enters a transitional period in life, it’s natural to start thinking about legacy. Just yesterday, Fall 2024 Editor in Chief Kimberly Aguirre published the final edition of her long-running column, “Comic Relief,” ruminating on her love for comedy and her gratitude for being able to express it in the DT for so long.

Aguirre’s former right-hand man and successor, Fendrich, has taken a different approach — opting to take shots at the entire student body on his way out. Now, I’m not calling him a coward for waiting until he’s about to be thousands of miles away from his classmates to call them fake Trojan fans, but the timing is convenient. Some have even called him the Nico Harrison of the West Coast.

Jokes aside, the topic of USC sports culture is an interesting one, but it’s one that Fendrich has a misguided perspective on. Let’s take it point by point. 

Fendrich begins by talking about football, a perfect place to start this discourse. As he noted, it’s a waste of time to compare USC to schools in the SEC; college football is ingrained in day-to-day life in the South in a way the average student here couldn’t begin to comprehend. But while it’s true that football culture at USC could improve, I just disagree with Fendrich that the onus for this falls on students. 

Even Fendrich concedes that when the team is good, fans show up and stay. Even this past season, when the Trojans were deeply mediocre, there were at least 73,000 fans — the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum has a capacity of 77,500 — at every home Big Ten football game, with the exception of a Friday night matchup with Rutgers (maybe stick to Saturdays, guys). 

Fans want to show up to football games, and do. For the majority of students, a desire to participate in big school sports culture played a role in their decision to come to USC. 

But if Head Coach Lincoln Riley wants fans to stay in the stands until the fourth quarter — even when the team is struggling to maintain national relevance — he needs to actually engage with the student body and local community.

Riley makes little to no effort to engage with fans, constantly picks fights with local media and doesn’t even take advantage of the recruiting gold mine that is Southern California. Former Orange County Register writer Luca Evans reported in the fall that USC coaches hadn’t been seen in months at local high schools such as Mater Dei, Bellflower and St. John Bosco — three of the best football programs in the nation. 

Think about Trojan legends such as Matt Leinart, Reggie Bush, Carson Palmer and Troy Polamalu. Their careers felt different because they were actually from SoCal, and they lived and breathed USC football. That sort of local DNA deeply matters and builds culture, but that seems to be a concept foreign to Riley — who continues to let countless five-star prospects go out of state. 

And when it comes to fan engagement, the work simply is not being put in. A video of University of Houston men’s basketball Head Coach Kelvin Sampson when he was first hired recently went viral — with the now 69-year-old walking around campus trying to recruit students to show up at games. 

In the decade since, Sampson has continued to engage with the student body and has also done the most important thing: win consistently. And now? Houston has one of the best basketball fan bases and home environments in the nation. The blueprint is there for Riley. 

If he doesn’t care to go to Sampson and the Cougars for inspiration, Riley can look even more locally (although we know he hates doing that) to Head Coach Lindsay Gottlieb and the USC women’s basketball team. Gottlieb and her staff are constantly engaging with their fan base — both the student body and the local Los Angeles community — and it has paid dividends. She has also brought in top local recruits, such as sophomore guard JuJu Watkins, freshman guard Kennedy Smith and senior center Rayah Marshall, who care deeply about playing for their hometown school and representing their city. 

The results are inarguable. In Gottlieb’s first season at the helm in 2021-22, USC home games had an average attendance of 740 fans. This past season? Make that 6,097. When the Trojans hosted UCLA on Jan. 14, 2024, the Galen Center attendance record was set, with 10,657 fans watching Watkins and co. take down the Bruins.

You can say that the singularity of Watkins and the timing of her USC tenure aligning with the meteoric rise of women’s basketball makes for an outlier, but that’s not exactly the case. This past October, USC women’s volleyball also broke its own attendance record at Galen, with 7,303 fans watching Head Coach Brad Keller’s squad battle UCLA. If you give Trojans fans a reason to, they will show up. 

Now, obviously, not all of those fans are students, but to me, that is part of the charm of USC home games. It’s rare to see any level of engagement from the school with the local South Central community, so my personal favorite USC sporting experiences are weekend day games at Galen. The crowds are full of kids, other local Angelenos and in most cases, a still pretty full student section. 

I’m not really sure why Fendrich frames “community members [making] up most of the Galen Center crowds” as a bad thing. It’s not, and it certainly isn’t unique to USC. There’s a reason why college arenas have student sections; it’s impossible to fill stands solely with undergraduates. And why should that be the goal? Across the country, alums and locals are integral parts of college fan bases. 

So my message to Riley is, “If you build it, they will come.” He hasn’t built much in his first few years at USC, and for the most part, fans have still packed the Coliseum stands. By bringing in the nation’s top recruiting class in 2026 — one full of California natives — there is evidence that Riley is moving in the right direction from a culture-building perspective. I hope he follows the example set by Gottlieb and doesn’t ignore the importance that his own demeanor and engagement level with the student body have in that culture. 

Fendrich’s concluding point is his least sensical. I’m not sure what kind of utopian world he wants to live in, where crowds are sold out at collegiate water polo and lacrosse games, but that’s never going to happen. It’s a sad reality, but pretending as if other schools have significantly better levels of engagement with their smaller sports is ridiculous. There are a few exceptions — it’s on my bucket list to get to a Nebraska women’s volleyball game — but for the most part, a select few college sports are king and always will be.

USC sports culture may not be perfect, but the Trojan fan base is a strong one and will remain that way. Just ask Gottlieb — if you recruit exciting local talent and build a winning culture, enthusiasm will build rapidly. I hope Riley and the leaders of USC’s other programs can follow her lead. 

Henry Mode is a sophomore opposing the takes offered in Editor in Chief Stefano Fendrich’s column, “The Great Debate.” Mode’s column, “The Not So Great Debate,” typically runs every other Monday, and he is a sports editor at the Daily Trojan.