BYU men's volleyball – Location, location, location

Memo to self: Got to get a more current photo – this mugshot is WAY old (but I wish I still had that much hair).
Responding to a comment/question on today’s feature story on BYU men’s volleyball playing its matches at the 5,000-seat Smith Fieldhouse and not at the 22,000-seat Marriott Center:
Yes, the latter can accommodate four times as many fans, but the Cougar players and coaches are quite pleased with the current arrangements at the fieldhouse.
A few reasons:
It’s a tight, compact court with the loud home crowd right on top of the action – that can be helpful for the hosts and intimidating for the visitors.
The Marriott Center is already double-booked for games and practices for men’s and women’s basketball as well as for the myriad of other uses (devotionals, forums, Church conferences and firesides, cultural events, etc.)
The team doesn’t like to practice on one court (the fieldhouse) and then play some of the matches there and some at the Marriott Center. The environmental differences can be unsettling – including changes in lighting, in floor flexibility, in air movement (ventilation) that affects passes and sets, and in vision-related factors such as depth perception, background and such.
A crowd of even 5,000 to 10,000 can get lost in the cavernous Marriott Center – just ask the women’s basketball team (which normally draws less than 1,000 to its home games) and those associated with the men’s basketball program when it had some win-loss struggles and wasn’t drawing well. If the men’s basketball staff had their way – and had access to abundant donor funds – they would just as soon see a smaller basketball venue (say between 12,000 and 15,000 seats) where demand exceeds ticket supply and a large crowd is a loud sell-out and not just a half-filled Marriott Center with a mostly empty upper concourse.