So what's the deal with AU not having any spirit?
Let's blame Benjamin Ladner. Blame Joni Comstock. Blame the basketball team. Blame the pep band. Blame this newspaper. Let's reinvent the fight song and logo yet again to inject a sense of tradition in a 113-year-old institution that still somehow lacks it. "Be cynical" is part of the "Be" campaign, remember?
Lots of people have taken heat for the perceived lack of spirit. But I'm not going to give another of the semi-monthly lectures about "Philling Bender" or anything like that.
Instead I'm going to dole out praise to people who probably don't even know they deserve it: AU fans.
AU fans are better than they get credit for. They are just misunderstood because they only support their teams when they perform at a high level.
That doesn't mean they don't have spirit. I know this because I've seen it. I've seen them sit shoulder to shoulder in Bender Arena for wrestling matches. I've seen them ring the turf at Jacobs Recreational Complex - on a Tuesday afternoon - for a field hockey game.
Field hockey and wrestling - two so-called "non-revenue sports" - are what AU fans really wanted to see this year. While they broke a sweat in a packed Bender or raised up on their toes to strain over their neighbors at Jacobs, cynics were complaining about basketball attendance and spirit.
From a bottom-line perspective, that makes sense. If any sport is supposed to help pay the bills, it's men's basketball. But leave it to Comstock and company to deal with that. Instead of using the number of bodies at a basketball game as just another reason to condemn AU, students should recognize that they do have spirit - for winning teams.
Look at the two sports I mentioned earlier. Many people watching them probably didn't know a lot about the rules or strategy. They didn't have anything to gain materially by showing up.
At big sports schools, students can boost their chances of getting coveted basketball or football tickets by showing up at field hockey matches. But at AU, where a ticket to anything is easily had, students show up just because they enjoy seeing their friends and floormates do great things.
By doing great things, I mean reaching the national stage. Wrestlers Muzaffar Abdurakhmanov and Josh Glenn did it by going deep into the NCAA tournament and being nationally ranked. The field hockey team did the same.
Winning Patriot League championships in minor sports, which almost every team has done, isn't enough to conjure up a buzz. Beating Holy Cross in basketball is not enough, either, especially when this artificially manufactured rivalry is pretty much based on a loss that happened more than four years ago. Sorry Steven Miles, you're no Bill Buckner, and AU isn't cursed. Bucknell set the league standard by winning - twice - in the NCAA tournament, and that's more relevant today than whatever the Crusaders did in the past.
That AU fans are demanding might make sense, looking at demographics. Most of them come from the Northeast, where fans require that their teams win. And if they're losing, they seem to be content with their teams garnering massive amounts of sensationalized media attention. See Owens, Terrell.
Winning is the bottom line. Stop complaining about spirit. You have it.
Maybe the athletics department won't put a half-page thank-you ad in The Eagle for it, but you and the school's most successful athletes deserve some gratitude.
