FCIAC Basketball Returns: Quantifying Home-Court Advantage in the State's Toughest Conference

by Stephen Barston

As basketball season returns yet again, the Blue Wave Boys Basketball team looks poised to make an impressive run in regular season play. The support for the team has increased dramatically in recent memory, with attendance at games growing and the environment in the Main Gym becoming more raucous each season. However, the question arises, how can one quantify home-court advantage in the FCIAC and where does Darien rank? Now the answers can finally be determined.

Modeled after a similar project done by the Harvard Sports Analytics Club, I calculated home point differential and away point differential over five seasons of each boys basketball team’s FCIAC regular season play, a total analysis of over 1700 data points. I then subtracted the away differential from the home differential to determine the cumulative points added at home for each team in the conference over the five-year time period. Divide this number by five, and one can  determine the home-court advantage points added per season (see table to the right).

Prior to seeing the data, Norwalk High School JV coach Kevin George gave his guess as to which team would be number one.

“My guess is Ridgefield or Danbury second [due] to distance. Of course [it] depends on where you’re coming from,” he said.

Senior captain Matt Staubi also thought Ridgefield would be at the top.

“I've heard that Ridgefield shows out to their games and the student section goes hard. I heard they made a kid cry or something so I would think they had the best home court advantage,” he said.

“I would say that Greenwich is high on the list. A good amount of kids come to the varsity games [there],” sophomore Charlie Dean, a member of last season’s DHS freshman basketball team, said, in what would turn out to be the most accurate guess out of all the interviewees.

Topping the list are the aforementioned Greenwich Cardinals, who finished two games above .500 last year (with an FCIAC record of 10-8), possibly thanks to their court environment. The expansive bleacher section creates a considerable amount of fan noise and the large gymnasium maintains this volume.

The Wilton Warriors, who play in a relatively nontraditional location for a basketball game, come in at second on the list. The fieldhouse (as it is called) at Wilton High School has a basketball court surrounded by a track and separated from the outer walls of the gymnasium by a large distance, perhaps 30 or 40 feet. This daunting environment, from past experience, throws off court vision for all players and disturbs depth perception and the overall shooter’s eye.

Furthermore, teams facing Greenwich and Wilton must endure long-distance trips, meaning that players will focus on things other than the game later that night, like dealing with that inevitably large amount of homework. Also, fans might not want to travel such a long distance. Danbury, the northernmost school in the conference, falls in at third most likely for the same reason (see image to the right).

Perennial powerhouse squads like Trinity Catholic, St. Joe’s, and Ridgefield find themselves towards the lower end of the rankings (9^th, 10^th, and 13^th respectively), but this can be explained by the teams’ incredible road performances during the five year span in which data was collected. The same can be said for both Fairfield Warde and Bridgeport Central, the two teams that have negative home-court advantages, as each of these two programs—amazingly enough—performed better in away games than in home games.

Darien can be found at number 11 on the list, but has had significant statistical improvement in recent years. The most important fact for members of the DHS community, however, is that the Blue Wave is located one spot above the rival New Canaan Rams.

As for improving this DHS basketball environment in the future, Staubi had something important to say to the self-proclaimed Blue Wave Superfans.

“People haven't consistently come to games and seemed to lose faith in our team last year, and towards the end of the year we barely had people at games. I think that we have players who get behind the crowd and who play better in front of a big group of people, and if we have a consistently good and loud student section it'll help add to the success of our season,” he added.

With a squad full of returning players and indications of renewed passion within the program, look for the DHS basketball team to take another step in the right direction this season, contingent on help from the Blue Wave fan base.