This year, Queen’s hosted some major sporting events, drawing fans across sports to Gaels home games. Highlighting these games, The Journal analyzed OUA records to see how game attendance at Queen’s Athletic events compares across the board.
Starting with the Queen’s Men’s and Women’s Varsity teams, The Journal compared attendance at basketball, hockey, and soccer games. Other varsity teams didn’t have enough data to compare.
Queen’s Men’s and Women’s basketball games are held in the ARC main gym with a capacity of 1,900 spectators, hockey games are held in the Memorial Centre with a capacity of 3,300, and soccer games are held in Richardson Stadium with a capacity of over 8,000. On average, most games don’t come close to filling capacity.
With the exception of Women’s Soccer, men’s games typically see more spectators than women’s games. For Soccer and Basketball, the women’s and the men’s teams play back-to-back with the women’s team playing their game first.
Basketball brings in the most fans between each sport. Compared to the other teams the Gaels have faced this season, Queen’s sees significantly higher attendance rates than their opponents.
Though Queen’s isn’t filling their venue capacity, they are still doing well at bringing in spectators. Queen’s is an outlier for women’s basketball attendance, with other Ontario schools drawing larger crowds at men’s games.
In November 2023, Queen’s hosted the U SPORTS National Football Championship: the Vanier Cup.
Hosting the Vanier came with a promise of tourism in the Kingston community, as both teams competing in the championship were out of town, and the Vanier Cup is the biggest Canadian University Football event of the year.
U SPORTS reported over 7,100 fans entered Richardson Stadium to watch the game. Though up to date with current trends, the number marks a slight decline in last year’s Vanier attendance, when the Vanier Cup was held at the University of Western Ontario.
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