It's Saturday night in the dead of winter, and 10,000 fans settle into their seats to see their favorite team in action. The arena lights shut off, music pulsates through the rafters, fireworks explode, spotlights roam the crowds and smoke rises as the athletes emerge from a fiery, glittering tunnel.

But the athletes are not dribbling basketballs and every one of them is under six feet tall -- way under.

Welcome to University of Utah women's gymnastics, where the Utah faithful have plenty of reasons to fill the arena year after year. Since 1982, Utah has won 10 NCAA championships and posted five runner-up finishes. Home crowds had been treated to an incredible string of victories -- 170 consecutive over a span of 23 years -- until the skein was snapped January 10, 2003, against the University of California, Los Angeles.

Utah gymnasts have competed on Olympic teams and national teams, and they've won all-America awards as frequently as the New York Yankees win baseball titles.

The squad's home meets have consistently averaged 10,000-plus fans since 1992. In 1993, Utah set a single-season gymnastics attendance record by averaging 13,164 spectators per home meet. It's the only revenue women's sport on campus.

But Utah head coach Greg Marsden said people might be surprised to know of the program's humble beginnings. "We used to bring 200 folding chairs into our training facility for home meets the first couple of years. Some people would sit on mats," he said.

Roots grew quickly

The team was formed in 1976 as part of the school's effort to establish women's sports programs. Low interest and lower visibility did not deter Marsden from envisioning huge crowds to watch his team compete.

"Nobody at the time believed women's sports could be popular spectator sports; it was an uphill battle," he said.

With a lot of hard work and commitment in the gym, the team quickly moved up in the then-AIAW (Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women) rankings and attendance grew. To accommodate more fans, the team moved into a 1,000-seat facility but quickly outgrew it.

The adage "Be careful what you wish for" was never more true than in 1979 when the team found itself competing in the 15,000-seat Jon M. Huntsman Center.

Marsden said, "That seemed much too large. It was a battle with my ticket manager to sell season tickets; he thought it was a waste of time."

If only the ticket manager had possessed half the foresight Marsden did. With the team's AIAW national championship in 1981, followed by five consecutive NCAA titles from 1982 to 1986, plus the implementation of Marsden's marketing ideas, attendance skyrocketed. Marsden no longer had to beg for ticket packages -- the fans did that for him.

His tactics included contacting local businesses to set up "coupons for tickets" programs, sending free tickets to young girls, and using in-game incentives and giveaways to get fans excited and involved. He bid for and hosted national and international gymnastics events to familiarize the community with gymnastics. More importantly, he studied popular spectator sports looking for the common themes that cultivated fan support. And when he found them, he brought them to Utah's home meets; hence the blackout, spotlights and fireworks a la the Chicago Bulls.

Knowing he couldn't do it all by himself and lacking personnel, he shared his vision with his athletes. "After practice, the team would sit in the gym and fold letters and stuff envelopes," he said.

It's that grass-roots effort that still permeates the team's promotional efforts, despite a general move toward more sophisticated methods.

"Now we buy billboards and newspaper ads. At the same time, our girls still dress up in their warm-ups and stand at the turnstiles at other sports events, handing out fliers about their home meets," Marsden said.

Psychology of publicity

Though every promotion was Marsden's idea, by no means was Marsden a frustrated marketing executive-type waiting for his big break. He had started out as a Utah graduate student assisting the fledgling gymnastics team, hoping to be a sports psychology professor.

"I thought I'd do it for a year or two," he said.

Early on, the local media largely ignored the team and its modest success.

Marsden said, "I was struggling with the media to cover our meets. I kept calling -- I was a nag. Finally, I was told, 'It's not our job to promote your team. It's our job to sell newspapers.' "

That sparked Marsden's desire to develop an all-out publicity campaign for the program.

"It was a combination of the light going on and me realizing we need to make our events more fun and fan friendly," he said.

Linda Hamilton, a reporter with the Deseret News in Salt Lake City, has covered the team since 1978. She has witnessed the growth in fan interest and in the team's importance on the local sports scene.

"(The Utah) SID asked me to talk with Greg, who was holding a holiday clinic; he wanted coverage. I did one or two little stories about it," Hamilton said.

Hamilton admits she was partial to the sport and was more than willing to cover the team, but in those early years, there wasn't a demand for coverage. In 1980, she convinced her editor to let her follow the team to Louisiana State University for the AIAW championships. Marsden had predicted a second-place finish, and he delivered.

Hamilton credits that success and Marsden's hosting of several national and world-class gymnastics competitions in Utah as key to gaining interested fans.

"People came out of curiosity and then followed up to watch the team. Much of the media started realizing it was popular and would become popular," she said. "By the time they won their first or second title, gymnastics was a priority for coverage and for people to go watch."

With many other sports teams in town, including the NBA's Jazz, Hamilton said Utah gymnastics is a perennial fan favorite in interest surveys conducted by the Deseret News. And while Hamilton covers many of those other teams, she ranks Utah gymnastics meets as one of the best-run events around.

"Greg always makes sure they run a crisp meet that's very entertaining. There's a little bit of showbiz, but they're not hokie. Things move along; there are no big delays. They always put it on like a spectacle, and the audience and media appreciate it," Hamilton said.

Kris Bosman, former assistant director of marketing at Utah and current Crimson Club event coordinator, said that Marsden makes her work with the team easy.

"I'm more of a person who carries out what Greg has in place. I'm a marketing middleman sometimes," she said.

"Greg is so great to work with because he has a very definite idea of what he wants the image to be and how he wants it presented. Greg has an idea of brand more than any coach I've worked with. He likes the look of the program to be cutting edge."

The real marketing challenge is keeping Marsden's ideas exclusive to the gymnastics team.

Bosman said, "He wants gymnastics marketed differently than our other programs. We've kept most things he's done signature to gymnastics."

In his 27 years of tinkering with promotions, Marsden has learned what works.

"The thing to watch for is the overuse of something," he said. "If you find something that's working, everyone piggybacks on it, and it becomes less effective. I also watch for when some of our promotions become stale."

Some of his promotions aren't even promotions in the traditional sense; they're just good business. Parking is free for all home meets. Marsden made the change in response to the needs of families looking for an affordable night of fun.

"We really have tried to make it easy for entire families to come," Marsden said.

And when people can't make it to a meet, Marsden and his assistant coach Aki Hummel have a Web site that streams live video of the competition. Based on fan interest, away meets can be streamed live or on a delayed basis.

Incentives for students to attend are included in the marketing plan. At each home meet, a computer selects one student's name, from all Utah students, at random. If that student is in attendance at the meet and makes it to the announcer's table in time, the student wins paid tuition for a semester.

Other than steady attendance, a telling sign that Marsden and his team are hitting the right targets, is the fact that all 12 scholarships are donated. The Dumke Gymnastics Center, where the team trains, was funded entirely by private donations.

Marsden's efforts have been a sort of Marketing 101 for gymnastics coaches around the country. When he travels to other gyms and sees similar promotions used, ones that he himself started, Marsden is appreciative, not angry.

He said, "We've always been eager to share our ideas with others. It's important to me now that women's gymnastics gets stronger and stronger."