Fans fill Jones AT&T Stadium and United Spirit Arena by the thousands to support the Texas Tech football and basketball teams, but the less observed sports at Tech have quite a smaller following.
Robert Cavazos, a junior business marketing major from San Antonio, said he is out to change that with a campus organization called Tech Small Sports.
"The idea came freshman year," Cavazos said. "I was checking out the athletic Web site and saw that we had many sports events on campus. I decided it would be cool to go to all of them. I enlisted my friends for the first volleyball tournament, and that's pretty much how it started."
Cavazos, president of Tech Small Sports, said he and his friends had so much fun at the volleyball tournament that they started attending different events.
"We had such a great time that we just kept going," Cavazos said. "We started going to soccer games and got the idea to form the group in October of 2004."
What started out as a group of friends taking advantage of free entertainment on campus turned into the idea to create a group for students supporting Tech athletics on the smaller scale.
"We created the Facebook group to give us legitimacy," Cavazos said. "From that point on, we kept going to different sporting events on campus."
Athletes who participate in sports with low fan attendance appreciate the presence of spectators at games and offer personal gratitude to the members of Tech Small Sports, Cavazos said.
"The athletes really love us," he said. "Whenever they see us on campus, they always thank us for coming to support them and ask us to come back."
Junior electrical engineering major from Dallas and vice president of Tech Small Sports, Kevin McKissick, said even though the games are not nationally televised, the competition is the reason he goes to the games.
"It just became really fun because it's Big 12 competition," McKissick said. "Competition makes everything fun."
Shane Costilla, a junior clinical lab sciences major from Dallas who refers to himself as the "Kelly Johnson expert," said one of the most rewarding experiences of Tech Small Sports was winning pizza for a year.
"They always have this promotion at volleyball games where everyone lines up on one side of the net and hit the ball over," Costilla said. "There are five pizza boxes on the other side. I ended up getting lucky and hitting one. They opened it up and told me I won free pizza for a year. They do that at pretty much all of the home games."
He also said supporting the teams and Texas Tech is an important reason to join their organization.
"We want more people in the stands," Costilla said. "It's kind of depressing that we have such a big stadium and no one is in it."
For Justin Jones, a charter member of Tech Small Sports, support comes in many different forms - including getting in the heads of the opposing team members.
We were sitting at the volleyball game against Iowa State," Jones said. "Since I went to high school in Iowa, Robert (Cavazos) asked me if I knew anyone on the team, and I told him that I that I went to high school with one of the girls from Iowa State and was acquaintances with her ex-boyfriend. Robert was like 'What's his name?' and I told him his name. Robert started bellowing her boyfriend's name across the gymnasium when she was serving. Everyone heard. Needless to say, she served the ball into the net."
McKissick said he was the mastermind behind a similar story.
"We were at the Tech baseball game versus Kansas State and one of their player's last name was Farr," the vice president said. "The player gets a base hit and he is on first base. We are sitting right behind him down the first base line. I remembered that one of the female athletes from Kansas State was named Farr too. So I began yelling at him asking him if he was related, and we got a response mid-pitch. He shook his head furiously no, then looked over at us when he got back on first. It was really funny."
McKissick said that due to the low turnout at small sporting events around Tech, it is easier to affect the minds of the players.
"We sit in the front row at volleyball games, so they hear us when they're on the court," McKissick said. "There's no one there, so they hear everything you say. We yell at (the other team) and mess them up."
Cavazos said he has dedicated his college career to encouraging a larger turnout at Tech sporting events and has assisted in that through a sponsorship.
"Freshman year I told the student athletes that I knew that I would make it my mission to get more people to come out for the games," he said. "We like to have promotional cookouts with food provided by Kiolbassa Provision Co. out of San Antonio, Texas."
In 2005, Cavazos and the other members were successful in becoming an official student organization at Texas Tech.
Tech Small Sports will be holding their next cookout Sept. 27 in the courtyard of Carpenter/Wells complex to kick off the volleyball game when Kansas visits Tech.
"Everyone is invited to join us for free food and also go to the volleyball game," Cavazos said.
For more information about Tech Small Sports, e-mail Cavazos at robert.t.cavazos@ttu.edu.
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