Some. We had women's season tickets for many years, particularly when Susie's mother lived with us; she particularly enjoyed going to the games. When we started buying women's tickets they were like $25 a season. You could go and sit anywhere in Allen Field House; easy to get in, easy to get out. You couldn't take your Mom to a men's game because of the difficulty of access.
I think the point of the cheap tickets was to build the fan base, but it never really worked; if the crowds grew at all in the 25 or so years that we went to most of the women's games, it was small, slow growth, not really noticeable. And the teams didn't get better; they got better around the league, the league got stronger, but we couldn't keep up. There were a lot of frustrating experiences. I remember an early one, about 1992-1993, when Colorado came in ranked in the top 5, top 10 maybe, and they had a "fill the fieldhouse day", heavily promoted, and drew about 6-7,000 fans. They led Colorado by 6 points with less than 10 seconds to play--and lost. No followup. The next couple of years they repeated "fill the fieldhouse day", but got smaller crowds and gave it up.
I don't remember all of the coaches. I remember one year Kansas State came in here, Nationally ranked, with an entire team of small-town Kansas girls, athletically not that gifted, but they REALLY knew how to play. KU played this entire team of black, inner-city kids from back east, and K State came in a whipped our butt pretty bad with local talent. Our coach at that time--and I can't remember his or her name--but he was so committed to the idea that the best basketball talent was in the big cities of the east that he couldn't see what was going on right in front of his face.
When we got back from Boston the coach, whoever he was, liked these BIG girls; we would always have some 6-foot-4-inch center with another 6-2 girl flanking her or a 5-11, 220-pounder. But they weren't ATHLETES; they were just big. I can remember a couple of their names, obviously not helpful here.
Then we got Bonnie Hendrickson, who came in with a really good resume, having coached somewhere further east; I think maybe Maryland? She was fun for a while, a really good recruiter. There were two problems. First, she had the worst case of Coach Speak that I ever heard. I mean, you literally could not decipher what in the hell she was talking about in the post-game shows. . .just strings of jargon piling up one on top of another. . .she beat the switch to the head and executed a nice 3-1-3 curl pattern after the left-side trap, but the shot tailed. Huh?
The bigger problem was that she always had a great recruiting class, but everybody transferred after a year or two. She could not keep her players in the house. I remember there was a local girl, can't remember the name, but she was a decent player and a colorful, quotable figure, somebody you could remember and focus on. Just before the season started one year she quit the team, leaving them with like two experienced players and a bunch of recruits. I happened to run into her, out and about in a neighborhood where I don't usually go, and realized she was about 8 months pregnant.
It's not like we never had good players and never won any games. Well, some years they didn't win any big 12 games, but we did have some good players. We had a big girl, like 5-10 or 5-11, a center named Johnson (I think) who could plant her foot, pivot and spin and score or anybody; she was fun, and we a point guard named Angel something who was sensational, just a joy to watch. That was in a period when the KU men's team didn't have a good point guard, and we would use her to explain what a point guard was SUPPOSED to be doing. But we could never sustain it, and the magic just never grew.
For several years the color man on the broadcast was Chuck Woodling, who was a good friend of mine; I'd stop by to say hello to him during a commercial, and the broadcaster on the women's games now is Steven (or Stephen) Davis, who is also a friend of mine; had lunch with him a couple of weeks ago. New coach a year or two ago, and we had a decent season this year and are now going to play the championship game of the NIT, in ALlen Field House, this Saturday; my wife and I are going. They are (in tne NIT) drawing the best crowds they have ever had for women's games, so maybe we have something going finally. Let's hope.
One more memory while I'm here. . . one time Mom was in the hospital for something, which she was quite a bit from 2012 to 2017. Anyway, she was in the hospital, and the entire women's team visited the hospital and came into her room. A couple of the players remembered her from the hospital visit and would see her at courtside, in her wheelchair, and would wave to her and even come over and say hello. That was great. And you'd get more free stuff, more T-Shirts and posters.