You guys are being FAR too optimistic when we are talking about a group of people who barely want to be there anyway. It’s just a lot to ask of people who come for the free stuff and nothing else.
The problem is that we've wasted the time when you identify and engage the new student section leaders. You know how I easily identified who leads the student section at basketball?
- We got John Parker at a women's soccer game.
- We got Travis Wacker at a volleyball game.
- We got Keerin Pinch at a men's soccer game.
- We got Jose Matamoros because Pinch dragged him to a soccer game the next year.
- This is a very short list that is nowhere near comprehensive.
There are a bunch of guys on this message board who I snagged in early September going to games for sports that would never make it on national television until their respective Final Four. Got them engaged right off the bat and kept pushing them to come back. Made every one of those people feel like they were
absolutely integral to the growth of the student section, because they were. It's easiest to be honest.
Students who show up for the first time at a men's basketball game are doing just as you say: they're coming for a free t-shirt or free food. The people who show up and are loud from week one at non-revenue sports are the ones who will ride or die for men's basketball.
You need someone who is loud, engaging and funny to get kids who are
begging for a reason to care at a school without football to follow through on that. What happens if you don't get those kids engaged from the moment they step on campus is they find something else to get into. Sometimes they find the Greek life, sometimes it's a community of gamers or music lovers, sometimes it's just good old-fashioned partying. If they come to games and no one says "You better be back at the next game," they'll find those communities and dedicate all their time to those groups. They may never come back to Panther games.
If there IS someone at those early games, who pulls them in, you know what happens? They still find those communities, but then they bring them along. Tommy Dunne and the TKE's were a bunch of Greek life nerds who were coming to basketball games anyways. There was a group of guys I'd see playing Halo LAN matches in the Rec Center all day, but by game time they were all on the bus downtown.
You need that person who is going to dedicate
far too much time towards getting students not just excited but
engaged with sports so that when they find their friends and the basketball season rolls around, they're grabbing all those kids and saying, "Hey I'm a student section leader let's go have fun at the basketball game." Every one of those guys (and girls) I engaged early on felt like they were important to the cause,
because they were. They had purpose from the jump, they immediately felt like they were a part of something, and they all delivered. The more you can get, the less you need from each of them every game, but you gotta make them feel like they're important and that's not handing them free pizza and a t-shirt. It's getting someone who is on their level as a student to engage with them, get to know them and let them know their effort is appreciated.
That person who finds the student section leaders can't be an employee of the athletic department, student worker or not. Because they need to be seen as having few limits on what they can do at games. You need someone who can be crass when needed, someone who has to get a "talking to" from someone in athletics every now and then because they crossed the line one too many times...tonight. I'm not saying they have to be like Andrew Dice Clay in the student section, but students need to see that this is their outlet to talk sh*t to whoever makes the mistake of coming into our building.
Because it's liberating to shout whatever the hell you want at people who know it's in the context of a college basketball student section and aren't going to be truly offended by it. And the ones who do get really pissy? It's so much funnier (looking at you, Tracy Dildy, you sack of sh*t). You need an old codger like Jimmy Collins to complain about the student section to the press and anyone who will listen after the game. You need the students to be so disruptive that people can't help but want to be a part of it next time.
I hate to say it (no, seriously, I do hate to say this), but they need the next me, and I'm 35. Those students look at me and they see Fred Flintstone doing the whole Steve Buscemi 30 Rock undercover bit (How do you do, fellow kids?). I can't do it anymore. But I'm not one-of-a-kind. There is absolutely some loud, obnoxious, funny asshole with a heart of gold who can fall in love with the program and spend all his free time trying to bring out the love for the program in everyone else around him.
The Josh Lutzows of the world, who are diehard fans before they ever step foot on campus, are rare as hell. We never needed to get people like Steve Franz to run through the dorms and get their friends psyched for basketball because you knew he'd be there in the front row before you were. From my limited experience in seeing how he interacts with the games, Petes is probably closer to the Steve Franz's of the world than the Jimmy Lemke's of the world.
And that's fine. Not everyone needs to be running chants. Sometimes you need the smartest guy with the sharpest tongue just standing in front talking sh*t at a volume just high enough for the 18-year old shooting guard standing outside the huddle to get distracted and miss some pertinent information the coach is relaying because he's being distracted by the guy talking sh*t directly to him from 10 feet away, so he goes out and misses his mark and causes a turnover at a pivotal moment in the game.
The most important thing is that we show up. After that, you find that guy who can engage everyone else. EVERYONE has their role to play, and if you're more comfortable sitting up in the stands and watching the game from an analytical tilt, who the hell am I to tell you that you need to be closer to the floor leading chants and sh*t-talking opposing teams and their fans?
I would be happy to help train that guy. But we have to have a volunteer, and I hate to say it but while I would never claim to be one-of-a-kind...I have yet to come across the person that was willing to eat, sleep and breathe Panther basketball while also having the kind of personality that will for sure be grating to many but will also be magnetic as hell to the people you need to get the rest of the student body into it.
We need everyone playing the roles they want to play, we just need to find that next guy. I'm going to take some time and think about how I got engaged with the program, and this message board, and how those things might help us find the next one. I think if there's one thing we each can do to help, it's to identify how we were engaged and then radicalized into becoming diehard fans and then
share those stories with the class. That's how we're going to find the next Jimmy, the next Steve Franz, the next Shaun Topel and the next Korry Bertram. We need 'em all and we need the institutional memory that's going to help us find them.
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SHARE YOUR STORY. We need to find the next ones.
