The Washington Interscholastic Activities Association saw attendance increase for the second straight year for the WIAA/Dairy Farmers of Washington/Les Schwab Tires fall state championships.
The WIAA, which oversees high school sports, ended the fall season with 71,152 fans attending the five different sports tournament events, an increase of 1,585 from the 2010 fall season, according to a WIAA media release. The largest attended sport was football (semifinals and finals) with 40,196 fans, an increase of 671 from the previous year.
The highest change was volleyball, which had an additional 1,310 spectators from 2010 with a total of 14,236. The mark set an association record for volleyball (accurate attendance records for individual sports have been kept since 1997). State cross country rounded out the sports that increased in attendance with another record-setting figure of 5,407. The cross country event has seen a steady increase since 2005.
In addition to the attendance figures, the WIAA launched the WIAA Network, a cross-platform endeavor that delivered television and web coverage of the state championships. The figures of the new online portal showed that 59,370 unique viewers watched webcasts of the 3A, 4A girls soccer semifinals and finals, girls swim and dive championships and the football state semifinals and Gridiron Classic, which excludes the Root Sports broadcast of the 3A and 4A football finals. Semifinals for football had the highest number of unique views with 31,672. The portal’s home page saw unique views of over 90,000 with a total page view count of 144,123, between Nov.1 and Dec. 3.
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