Courtside Student Seating Increases Home-Court Advantage for Hawkeye Basketball
PHOTO: STEPHEN MALLY/HAWKEYESPORTS.COM
Fans in Carver-Hawkeye Arena's new seating section make noise during a free throw in the Iowa men's basketball team's victory against UCLA in January 2026.
After defeating UCLA at home earlier this month, Iowa men’s basketball coach Ben McCollum and his team high-fived courtside Hawkeye fans once again to show their appreciation. While the home crowd’s impact can’t be quantified in a box score, the Hawkeyes feel its effect.
This season, the UI Athletics Department added courtside seating behind Carver-Hawkeye Arena’s south baseline to move more than 200 fans closer to the action. The area is reserved primarily for the Hawks Nest, Iowa’s official student section, to help increase their engagement in the game and the Hawkeyes’ home-court advantage.
Matt Henderson (91BS), deputy director of athletics for external relations, gathered feedback from students, coaches, and student-athletes and reviewed the arena layouts of some of the nation’s top teams to inform this short-term solution. Henderson says he sought to answer the question, “How can we make it easier and entertaining for [students] so that not only they want to be there, but while they’re there, they’re having fun cheering on their fellow students?”
While UI Athletics is exploring plans to modernize Carver-Hawkeye Arena, Henderson says this interim fix has helped create a livelier environment and improve student ticket sales from last season. Since Carver opened in January 1983, Iowa men’s basketball has won nearly 77% of its games there, compared to 42.5% away from home. The Hawkeyes hope to build on that historic advantage, similar to how renovations to the north end zone at Kinnick Stadium in 2019 heightened a noisy atmosphere that rattles opponents.
PHOTO: Myles Harris/hawkeyesports.com
Hawkeyes Tavion Banks (No. 6), Kael Combs (11), and Alvaro Folgueiras (7) hype up the Hawks Nest at the men's basketball game against Western Illinois in November 2025.
Fan Support
While home teams benefit from being familiar with the venue, avoiding travel fatigue, and keeping their routine, those factors rarely match the impact of a supportive home crowd. Patricia Espe-Pfeifer, who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and is director of sports psychology and student-athlete mental health, says much of the research on home team advantage conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic—when student-athletes competed in front of cardboard cutouts instead of fervent fans—demonstrated this point.
“There are a lot of studies that found a significant reduction of the home advantage effect during those ghost games where there weren’t any attendees,” says Espe-Pfeifer. “There are still some factors that were beneficial for the home team, but not having the supportive fans there really lowered the benefit.” And when home fans create a lot of energy to fuel scoring runs and strong defense, Espe-Pfeifer says they also can influence calls for the home team while disrupting the opponent’s communication and focus.
For McCollum and his team, that energy is contagious. “The crowd willed us to victory, and that’s why it’s important to have a [home] crowd,” he said after Iowa’s win over UCLA. “In these kinds of games, it gets you 10 points. Just the atmosphere, the energy, people standing and cheering.”