With the success of the Wichita State men’s basketball team, the athletic department has had its hands full lately. They aren’t the only ones who have been busy, though.

The popularity of WSU has grown immensely since they first entered the NCAA Tournament in March.

“In the last three weeks in my position we’ve never come close to the amount of interview requests we’ve received,” Larry Rankin, assistant athletic director for Media Relations, said.

Through the achievements that the basketball team has made have been the driving factor for the interest their success could lead to a surge in all other sports as well.

“I think overall it’s going to help all of the sport programs,” Rankin said. “Any time one of our sports excels on the national stage it helps the other programs as well as the university.”

Just how much has the increased exposure helped the university?

In the past 20 days the traffic that WSU has generated from Google has climbed by 120 percent using search terms such as “Wichita State University,” “WSU mascot,” and anything else WSU related – including any misspellings of “Wichita.”

While those statistics are impressive, the increased traffic from Google pales in comparison to the amount of traffic that social media.

Perhaps surprisingly, Facebook climbed the least at about 140 percent while Google+ had a fairly large edge at 200 percent. The king of social media this time around was Twitter, however, with a massive 600 percent increase in referrals over the last 20 days.

However, with inquiries up by about 3,000 percent, it is none other than the WSU mascot WuShock who seems to have garnered the most attention.

But what do these statistics mean for the big picture? All the media attention could signify a lot for the future of the university.

“We also see big increases in people looking for information about academics, costs and generally, people seeking answers to the question ‘What is Wichita State University?’” Bryan Masters, director of Web Services at WSU, said.

It’s still too soon to know what will be happening from an admissions aspect, but the increased exposure has certainly put WSU on more students’ radar.

“When a sports team does well it opens up a window for everything in the university,” Bobby Gandu, WSU director of Admissions, said. “Our window got a lot bigger.”

With many high school seniors having already researched, applied for admissions, and signed to their respective colleges there likely won’t be a large increase in applications for admission for a while. “Where I think we will see the most interest is in high school juniors and younger,” Gandu said.

Although more time needs to pass before anything can be certain, the increased interest in the university gives hope to a promising future in academics and athletics.