January 4, 1992 – the birth of Banditland.
As the Buffalo Bandits sat in the locker room at Memorial Auditorium ahead of their first-ever game in the MILL (now NLL) against the New York Saints, fear filled them.
What if no one showed up?
Little did they know, a line of people wrapped around The Aud waiting to buy tickets and get in so they could see what the Bandits were all about, forcing the game to be delayed for 30 minutes because the ticket scanners couldn’t go fast enough to process the demand.
That night, 9,052 people witnessed the Bandits play their inaugural game. Then for the next home game, 13,581 people came. For the final two home games of that first season, every one of the 16,325 seats was filled, the first two sellouts of many through the franchise’s history.
“It really goes back to day one,” Senior Director of Lacrosse Operations Scott Loffler said. “Buffalo just wanted something to cheer for and the Bills and Sabres were in their heyday, and the Bandits were the next thing.”
Thirty-three years after that first game at The Aud, the Bandits set an NLL attendance record of 166,238 this season across nine home games, including four sellouts. No game had fewer than 17,240 people in attendance, 915 more than the first sellout in 1992.
With the Bandits’ first-round matchup in the 2025 NLL Playoffs against the San Diego Seals on Friday at 7:30 p.m., they’ll look to build on that number with KeyBank Center being packed to the brim.
“You know Buffalo sports fans are passionate,” Loffler said. “If you’re a winning team, they’re going to come and support you and that’s what we’ve been seeing.”
From the jump, the Bandits were successful.
After losing their first three games in franchise history, the Bandits won 22 consecutive games across three seasons from Feb. 8, 1992 to Feb. 5, 1994, selling out every regular-season game during the winning streak.
During the streak, the Bandits won back-to-back championships in 1992 and 1993 and even after the streak was broken, made the championship in 1994.
“The fact that the Bandits were dominating, and they were on a 22-game win streak at one point, you just knew going into the arena that you were going to win because the team was that good,” public address announcer Chris “Swennie” Swenson said. “Either that or you were going to be entertained because of all that was happening in the arena.”
Swenson is one of the two people to be with the Bandits since day one, the other being franchise leader in points and current head coach John Tavares.
Infamous call-and-response chants like “What’s he got?” (answer: nothing) and “Buffalo WHAT?” (answer: Bandits) were originated by Swenson as a way to get the crowd involved in the game, helping to create Banditland as we know it today.
For this reason, Loffler calls Swenson the “Godfather of Banditland.”
“He sets the tone, he sets the atmosphere, he sets the mindset of our fans when they come into the building or when the game starts,” Loffler said. “They feed off of him. The more he gets going, the more they get going and then the more the team gets going. It’s like a life cycle, almost of all these different factors that happen both on and off the field.”
Originally, Swenson wasn’t going for an entertainment vibe but rather an educational one.
With box lacrosse being a fairly new sport in the United States, Swenson wanted to make sure the fans understood the intricacies of the sport.
“I’m not sure people truly knew what box lacrosse was and I wondered did they really understand the game,” Swenson said. “I spent a lot of time back in the day not only educating myself but also educating the masses as a PA guy. As things would happen on the floor, I would try to describe it so they could understand it and be educated on the sport.”
As soon as knowledge of the sport, and word of the Bandits, started spreading, The Aud was the place to be.
According to Swenson, if you weren’t watching the Bandits, you were missing out on what people were talking about, and you were missing primetime entertainment.
In all eight of the Bandits’ games in their inaugural season, they scored double-digit goals, including scoring 20-plus goals four times. On top of that, the hits and fights came with a higher frequency than they do in the current style of play in the NLL.
“It became the hottest ticket in town,” Swenson said. “People’s natural instinct is, ‘I want to be a part of what I can’t be a part of, so how do I get a ticket to the Bandits?’ They saw what was happening on the floor, it was exciting. Back then, 20-15, 22-17, those kinds of games where there was a ton of scoring and there was fighting and there was hitting.”
Another factor that came into play in making Banditland was the location of Buffalo – situated right near the Canadian border, where box lacrosse is the biggest, as well as by the Seneca Nation, part of the Iroquois Confederacy, the inventors of lacrosse.
Current players Zack Belter, Ron John and Tehoka Nanticoke grew up going to Bandits games, watching greats like Tavares and Mark Steenhuis play at KeyBank Center.
“We have this perfect storm and perfect recipe of the passionate Buffalo sports fans, the success on the field but also geography does play a part in this,” Loffler said. “We draw a lot from Canada, we draw a lot from Native American reservations, even Six Nations in Hamilton, Canada.”
For 33 years, the Bandits have been able to draw in fans like no other team can do, They are the longest active franchise in the NLL and have consistently set attendance record. It all traces back to that January night in 1992 at The Aud.