Lift Every Voice and Cheer

Yesterday the DNT published a letter from a tUMD men’s hockey season ticket holder about an ongoing gripe among hockey fans.

Ha! Gotcha, you thought this was another letter about the coaching situation on the women’s team, didn’t you? No, it’s about how fans aren’t loud enough.

This guy’s letter was a little different, because unlike most people, he didn’t just call out the students, he called out the old people too.

He starts out by chastising tUMD fans for not showing up at the NCHC tournament last year. He asks, “How fantastic it would be if we had more Bulldog fans who would travel down with us in support of our team?” I would counter by asking, how fantastic would it have been if tUMD had actually been at the tournament? It would have been 11 metric fantastics, or 6.3*10^11 British Standard Fantastics. Also I was there in tUMD gear and so was my family, and we were louder than Denver and Miami fans combined. Just sayin’. Kaw.

Then he calls out the student section for being crappy and not having loud, creative, or funny chants anymore. I will refer him to Biddco, who has independently confirmed that the smart phone era has killed our student section.

The letter is strange and kind of all over the place, like he wrote some of it at one time, then came back and wrote some more without re-reading the first part, and then he forgot to put in a bunch of other stuff. It reads like some RWD blog posts! Anyway, his first paragraph is right. We can all do better.

People need to cheer more, and not just when others are cheering. I know we are like 99% Scandinavian in ancestry, or if not Scandinavian, some other sort of stoic European nation, but it’s not an actual crime to yell out “Come on, ‘Dogs!” or “Let’s go!” or some other totally generic phrase. You don’t have to come up with something creative or earth-shattering, you can leave that to Biddy and me. Sometimes just squawking is acceptable; sometimes one just cannot find appropriate words to express just how crazy a situation is.

No one should be embarrassed to cheer. I mean, other than people who yell SHOOOOOOOOOOOOOT the second a power play begins. Although really, those people are 100000000x better than people who sit on their hands until the video board gives them permission to make an appropriate amount of noise that will blend in to the general noise so no one can really hear them.

Of course, it’s hard not to be embarrassed to cheer when others around you act like you have just audibly farted during a funeral. Or like you’ve screamed something vulgar during a moment of silence in memory of a coach’s father… I suppose because it’s dead silent in the arena, a person might get confused and think they are in a library or church or something.

The arena seems to be set up to muffle crowd noise. How can I be shouting and have someone a section over from me unable to hear it? The most passionate students, who stand behind the goal to harass the goalie, end up screaming into the glass. This isn’t going to change, so that’s just another reason why individual fans need to get over their fear of looking like a moron and just go for it.

Unfortunately, many cheers are stifled just as they get started, thanks to a stoppage of play and the ridiculously loud Nickelback/Van Halen/whatever music that blasts from whistle to puck drop, killing any crowd buzz that might have started thanks to a scrum around the net or back-and-forth play or whatever exciting on-ice play occurred.

The bottom line? There are a lot of excuses not to cheer, and we need to replace those excuses with solutions, and be loud. Stand up, old people, and be heard. Otherwise how else will Shepherd know he’s wrong and Rau know he sucks and is a big whiny diving baby?