KNOXVILLE -- President Barack Obama may have been in Knoxville on Friday afternoon, but perhaps the most determined campaigning took place in a University of Tennessee cafeteria.
That's where Donnie Tyndall, the first-year coach of the basketball Volunteers, was interacting with students and snapping pictures with them in hopes they would come to Thompson-Boling Arena for today's game against Alabama.
Tennessee is hoping for its biggest turnout of the season to help its young team improve to 8-0 at home.
"I think it's great," freshman forward Tariq Owens said. "I really like Coach Tyndall and what he does to help the team out. I really like that he goes out and tries to get more support for the team."
On his Twitter account after Tennessee's SEC-opening win at Mississippi State on Wednesday night, Tyndall posted a message pleading for 20,000 fans to come to the game against the Crimson Tide.
The Vols' average home attendance for seven nonconference games was 13,629, the season-high of 14,245 coming in the New Year's Eve afternoon contest with East Tennessee State.
Playing in front of big crowds is new to first-year players such as Owens, who is from Odenton, Md. -- the population there, according to the 2010 census, was a little more than 37,000 -- and claims the biggest crowd he played in front of in high school was "probably a couple hundred."
"We have a great deal of respect for Alabama. They're a very, very good team, and we're going to need all the extra help we can get," Tyndall said. "We've had good home crowds to this point. Our crowds have gotten into the game during stretches of the games to help us get a lot of key wins, and we just want to make it even that much tougher on Alabama tomorrow night."
Tennessee's two best wins of the season, against then-No. 15 Butler and Kansas State, came at Thompson-Boling.
"A major part of us being tough to beat at home is the crowd," Owens said. "We come to our home games and we have a good, supportive crowd that's rowdy. Everybody's loud, they get up and cheer, and it helps our toughness at home."
The Vols carry a 10-game home win streak into today's game, and Tyndall's personal home-court winning streak is 22 games, dating back to the 2013 National Invitation Tournament.
"We're a young team, so we pick up from the energy from the fans," junior forward Derek Reese said. "We really need that on the home court. On the road, it's tough for us to get that to get into the game, but we're so used to having that home-court advantage. That helps us a lot, so that's why we're trying to get as many people here for the game."
And that's why Tyndall was out and about on campus Friday.
The campaign-in-the-cafeteria move is straight out of the Bruce Pearl playbook. Tennessee's former coach did the same his first year in Knoxville and went on to become successful and popular in Knoxville. Cuonzo Martin, Tyndall's predecessor, and his staff occasionally went to the cafeterias to eat and mingle with students.
Promoting his program was necessary for Tyndall at his two previous stops at Morehead State and Southern Mississippi, and even though he's now at Tennessee, which finished 12th in the country in attendance last season, he still views it as something he needs to do.
"We've done that everywhere we've been," he said. "(We) just try to take a couple times each year where we go over to the cafeteria, announce that we have a big game the next day and spend some time, take some pictures and let those people get to know us.
"A lot of those kids sacrifice a great deal. They're paying for their school. A lot of our kids aren't, and we're asking (for) their support when they have a hundred different other things they could be doing.
"We just want to go over there and show some appreciation and give them some love and let them know how important they are to our success in hopes they'll come out and watch us play."
Contact Patrick Brown at pbrown@timesfreepress.com