Felecia Theune, PhD
Dr. Felecia Theune is a higher education research and strategy professional whose work sits at the intersection of sociology, data analysis, and institutional decision making. She holds a PhD in Sociology and is a Lecturer at the University of Miami, where she teaches research methods and conducts market and workforce research, trend analysis, and program evaluation that guides strategy for graduate online learning.
Her connection to college athletics runs deep. Dr. Theune spent nearly a decade inside the University of Miami Department of Athletics Academic Services, first as an Academic Support Specialist working directly with student-athletes, then as Learning Specialist and Mentor Coordinator overseeing data driven academic programs and student outcomes analysis. Before that, she spent 12 years as a sports journalist, working as a reporter and copy editor. She understands how athletic departments operate, how they are structured, and what pressures their leadership faces, not as an outside observer, but as someone who has worked within them.
Before her career in higher education and athletics, Dr. Theune built a foundation in marketing and strategic communications, developing materials, leading proposals, and helping organizations translate strategy into clear and compelling communications. That practitioner experience shapes how CCS delivers its work: research findings that are rigorous, defensible, and useful — written in language athletic leadership can act on.
Her sociological foundation shapes how she approaches attendance, not as a marketing problem, but as a behavioral one. Attendance is a decision. And like any decision, it can be studied, understood, and influenced when you ask the right questions of the right people.
What CCS believes — and where it's headed.
To give college athletic programs the structural and behavioral diagnosis their attendance challenges actually require — so strategy is built on research and understanding, not instinct and guesswork.
To become the leading attendance diagnostics partner for college athletics — the first call programs make when they are ready to understand what is actually driving their attendance.
CCS operates alongside, not in competition with, marketing agencies, ticketing platforms, and internal athletics staff.
It started with a question no one was asking.
The idea for Campus Crowd Strategies grew from a conversation with a senior administrator at a Power conference athletic department. The team had a winning record. Postseason play was within reach. Attendance was soft. The administrator was working through explanations — schedule, promotions, timing — trying to piece together an answer from the inside out.
"You haven't asked people why they don't come. You have to do some research. Otherwise, it's just guesswork."
— Dr. Felecia Theune, to a Power conference athletic administrator
That observation was deceptively simple. Athletic departments have coaches, analysts, marketers, and operations staff who understand sports deeply. What they often lack is the infrastructure to understand their audience — the behavioral science behind why someone decides to come to a game, and why they decide not to.
Dr. Theune built CCS to fill that gap. Not as a critic of how athletic departments work, but as someone who had worked inside one — and knew exactly what was missing.
Research backed strategies that build sustainable attendance culture.
Most athletic departments approach attendance through promotion, more posts, more giveaways, more email blasts. Campus Crowd Strategies approaches it through research. The two are not in conflict, but one without the other is working in the dark.
CCS partners with athletic departments to understand who is not coming and why, and to develop evidence based strategies that move programs from reactive event marketing toward the kind of consistent attendance behavior that builds attendance culture over time. The result is not just a bigger crowd on game day. It is a program that understands its audience well enough to grow it deliberately.