And the 2017 BOTF Winner is ...
February 17, 2017
By Geoff Kimmerly
Second Half editor
When Shafer Webb and his classmates were middle schoolers, they watched the high school student section turn into a party at every Frankenmuth home game.
Webb's older brother Brennan led the 2012 section that won the inaugural MHSAA Battle of the Fans. And, of course, older brother told younger that no student section would ever measure up to the original champion.
Shafer, and about 300 of his friends, took that as a challenge – and have responded by earning a second championship banner as the first two-time winner in BOTF history.
"It shows we had good leadership this year, and it sets the standard for next year," Shafer Webb said. "It helps we won; now we have something tangible to show how good we were, and hopefully that will inspire them to continue next year."
Frankenmuth will accept its Battle of the Fans VI championship banner during halftime of the Class B Girls Basketball Final on March 18 at Michigan State University’s Breslin Center. The other four finalists also have been invited to Breslin to be honored for this season’s achievement.
Frankenmuth was chosen based on a vote by the MHSAA’s 16-member Student Advisory Council influenced by public vote on the MHSAA’s Facebook, Twitter and Instagram sites. A total of 20,125 social media votes were received, with those results then equated against a school’s enrollment.
The Council based its vote on the following criteria: positive sportsmanship, student body participation, school spirit, originality of cheers, organization of the group, section leadership and overall fun.
Boyne City totaled the most public social media support, finishing first across all four ways votes were accepted (Facebook likes and shares, Twitter re-tweets and Instagram likes) – despite being the smallest school among our finalists. Votes were scaled to take into account a school’s size – although Traverse City West received the most social media votes total, Boyne City’s when compared to its student enrollment pushed the Rambler Rowdies to the top of the list. Frankenmuth finished second in the social media voting.
Other numbers to consider from this season's contest: The application videos have been watched more than 16,600 times, and the MHSAA-produced videos from our tour stops have nearly 5,700 views. The stories on the five finalists plus Tuesday’s explanation of how to vote had been viewed 10,270 times as of 8:30 this morning. The five Snapchat stories covering our visits were viewed nearly 13,000 times combined.
We were excited at the beginning of this Battle of the Fans because we received our most entries since the first BOTF in 2012, and our most first-time entries ever (of course not counting that first contest). That means the spirit of Battle of the Fans is thriving in a number of communities, while also catching on in more every year. This year’s finalists no doubt will inspire student leaders at more schools to create championship-caliber student sections – and below is why we were inspired during our five BOTF tour stops.
Now See This Award: Boyne City
What we saw: The “Rambler Rowdies” burst on the scene for Battle of the Fans VI with a hype machine that would be the envy of many organizations. It didn’t take us long after entering the school to find messaging advertising the night’s theme (Fright Night) and activities, and the in-house television promos were especially impressive. Of course, our visit was on Friday, Jan. 13, which made the horror film-style night a perfect choice. And the Rowdies played it well, filling the stands for a makeshift graveyard of living fans, opening the festivities with students rushing in screaming from all corners of the gym and putting together some fun props (including an impressive surf board) with a consistent message of “R.I.P. Bad Sportsmanship.”
Why we’re fans: As people who focus on promoting the benefits of high school sports on a daily basis, we were immediately impressed with Boyne City’s marketing work. But we also were impressed quickly with how the section draws from all different communities within the school, not just athletes, and with one of the leaders not involved in sports at all but instead part of the band and theater cast. Boyne City also was our smallest finalist this season, but packed in enough fans to at least feel comparable in section size to the other four – all while being our first stop and having to set the tone for this year’s tour. The Rowdies set it well.
Be the Change Award: Charlotte
What we saw: We returned to Charlotte for the second straight year and anticipate it won’t be our last BOTF trip to see the “Flight Club,” which is anything but a one-hit wonder. You want something built? Call the Orioles, who have the best props we’ve seen/heard about over our six years on tour. We didn’t see the “bird cage” used before football games but were intrigued by the description; we did see the two giant tifos and wonder why more schools aren’t making the same to drape over their student sections. The Flight Club also came up with a sharp idea of posting their “pilots” with megaphones on raised platforms at each side of the section so they can lead cheers and be seen and heard by all of their classmates – another great idea from a group that literally has built from nothing one of the strongest student section programs in the state in just two years.
Why we’re fans: The Flight Club is having a lot of fun, and we loved hearing the stories – whether they were telling us about the mostly-failed slip-n-slide at a football game or the much more popular “highlight” games where the section attended events for every sport, including bowling. In a short time, they’ve created a lot of memories – one that sticks out is how the driver for a spirit bus during football season took a 10-minute detour after an away game to allow the students to hang out a little bit longer. As a whole, the last two years in Charlotte have been a fun trip. And we're sure the Flight Club will continue to thrive.
Draw the Blueprint Award: Petoskey
What we saw: The “Blue Crew” returned as one of the north’s best-known student sections by following a blueprint – pun only slightly intended – that any school could follow. After becoming a finalist for the first Battle of the Fans in 2012, the Blue Crew dwindled especially the last few years and into this past fall. But following a few proven steps, the Crew returned to its former height. First, student leaders attend an MHSAA Sportsmanship Summit in November. Then, on the way home, they started a section Twitter feed so they could communicate with classmates en masse. They set expectations, like featuring girls basketball games just as much as boys and letting students sit based on when they showed up to games, not their seniority. And with a leadership group including students from multiple classes, they ensured there will be student section veterans to pick up the reins again after these seniors graduate.
Why we’re fans: For starters, we love a good comeback story. We’re also a big fan of sections cheering on more than the boys basketball team; we always hear that they do, but we saw it with our own eyes as the Blue Crew began filling during the girls varsity basketball game (played before boys on this night) during our trip, despite the fact junior varsity and freshman teams also were playing at other locations and it was a Wednesday. We also try to emphasize every year that the best student sections are those who remember they’re at games to cheer for their classmates – not become the event themselves. The Blue Crew was all in, cheering on both the girls and boys varsities against Sault Ste. Marie, starting early and taking their fever to the final buzzer. Most of all, the Crew showed there’s a plan for any school that would like to accomplish the same – and we’ll surely be using Petoskey as an example in years to come.
Legacy Award: Traverse City West
What we saw: With three BOTF finals appearances, Traverse City West – our 2016 champion – has entered something of an unofficial ring of honor as one of the student sections that always will be in the mix to win this contest any year it applies. The setup of a Student Senate running the show is proven and provides West an opportunity to affect student life at its school to a degree others could emulate. The Bleacher Creatures built a sizable section for our visit despite not having school that day, and with it put on display some of the same great traditions we’ve come to enjoy during past visits. This section was around long before Battle of the Fans, and would be just as great even if it wasn’t competing regularly to be known as best in the land.
Why we’re fans: It’s hard to watch the Creatures do their thing and not think it would be fun to be a part. Ask Petoskey – watching West at a game last season helped motivate the Blue Crew to get back in the game this winter. The Creatures are loud, they’re together, the chants and cheers they do are all their own, and their most notable traditions also include the “Bucket Brigade” leaders who stand at the front and bequeath the honor from year to year. What we’ve noticed especially the last two years is how much West students love their school and community – and no wonder there’s a sense of pride that continues to get passed down to those who will fill the bleachers next.
Battle of the Fans champion: Frankenmuth
What we saw: In some ways, what we saw resembled a lot of what we saw on our first BOTF visit ever in 2012 – a few hundred students making up at least half (or more) of the student body dressed up in sometimes ridiculous costumes putting on a dance party and singing along. Section leaders have played on successful teams in other sports, and it was obvious their competitiveness boiled over into this contest. But as much as Frankenmuth enjoys the thrill of the fight, cheerers simply were having fun – from the costumes to the songs, to the original cheers and well-placed side shows. Be it the fullback taking an imaginary football handoff and diving in to knock down 270 people, or the “fake” wrestling match complete with good guys and bad guys, foreign objects and a championship belt, we saw some things we hadn’t seen before – and will be laughing about for years to come.
Why we’re fans: At the end of the day, Battle of the Fans is about a few things – bringing together a large group of the student body and drawing that crew from all grades and social groups, cheering classmates the right way with sportsmanship, and having the kind of fun that would make someone on the other side of the gym wish he or she could be a part. This year, Frankenmuth is that section – be it for the student from a rival school who shows up and always seems to know the theme of the night, or the parents across the floor during our visit who also got into “Costume Night’ and showed up in half-German and half-basketball garb. Frankenmuth’s student section no doubt riles up fans from opposing sides – but from a wider view, it’s a good bet those across the floor would love to join in, or hopefully start the same success story at their schools.
"It shows we give our student athletes a lot of support, and certainly we encourage kids that it's OK to be different," Webb said.
"I think it would be a lot more fun that whoever we're playing had just as good a student section as us. ... Hopefully this encourages other student bodies to participate in something like this at the other schools around us."
The Battle of the Fans is sponsored in part by the United Dairy Industry of Michigan.
Check out below our stories and videos behind the finalists. Also, click to see student-produced videos from all sections that entered the contest. (Photos by Chip DeGrace.)
Boyne City
Read all about it: 5 Ways Boyne City's Ramblers Get Rowdy
Charlotte
Read all about it: 5 Ways Charlotte's Fight Club Soars
Frankenmuth
Read all about it: 5 Ways Frankenmuth is Flying High
Petoskey
Read all about it: 5 Ways the Blue Crew Has Us 'Believin'
Traverse City West
Read all about it: 5 Ways West's Creatures Continue to Crush
Have you Herd? Buchanan Tradition Lives On
By
Geoff Kimmerly
MHSAA.com senior editor
February 14, 2020
BUCHANAN – Every year cheering in Buchanan High School’s student section is different – a different mix of students guarantees a different leadership style, different ideas and different levels of creativity.
But let’s not confuse different with new. Buchanan has built one of the state’s richest student section traditions, and with the accolades to back it up – Battle of the Fans championships in 2013 and 2018 and four other finals finishes.
There’s no forgetting The Herd’s past. And why would anyone want to try?
Section leaders going back nearly a decade are recalled as famously as any recent star athlete. Current section leaders readily recall when they, as elementary students, learned Herd staple cheers like “Geronimo” from those past all-stars during visits – traveling pep rallies – to their elementary and middle schools.
Photos from years past adorn classroom walls, stoking memories and new ideas. And past Herd campaigns like “Mean Stinks” and “Don’t be a Bully” provide memories of growing up in a school and community that has become known as a standard-setter for student section support – and added to the legacy with another BOTF finalist tour visit Tuesday for its boys basketball game against Watervliet.
“We've been doing this for so long. It's just like an expectation,” Buchanan junior Mia Struss said. “It's what we do. It's what Buchanan does. Everybody comes together on Friday nights. Or like this (visit) happened on a Tuesday – we know we're going to have fun, so we're just like ‘Come out’ or ‘Are you guys going to the game? Oh yeah! Absolutely, we're going to the game.’ Everybody just comes together and has a fun time because it's what we do. It's what we're used to doing.”
There’s a well-worn path from the MHSAA’s East Lansing office to Buchanan during Battle of the Fans season.
As noted above, this was our sixth visit in nine years of BOTF, and current seniors were in fifth grade the first time we made the trip. We know how the section got started, we readily can recall leaders we’ve met in the past and cheers that pop immediately into our heads when we even think about coming back to see The Herd.
But instead of relying on that knowledge, we approached Tuesday like we’d never been to Buchanan before. We asked the assembled leaders – seniors Carter Aalfs, Nora Kaltenbach, Jade Smith, Rose Johnson and Bobby Ruth and juniors Ty Scurlock and Mia and her twin sister Morgan Struss – the questions we always ask. How did this get started? What has this meant to your school? Why did you get involved?
Their answers could’ve been word for word what Herd leaders told us in 2013 or 2018 or during any other trip. The conversation just reinforced how ingrained the cheering section has all the way down to the elementary students dreaming of joining in when they are older.
As they joked – but maybe not? – The Herd is a lifestyle.
This is how they live.
Game Time
Buchanan had to deal with a bit of a curveball this BOTF season. Originally, the Herd was going to host the MHSAA on Friday, Jan. 31. But a school-wide illness knocked out the Bucks’ opponent for that night, and the only feasible make-up for the BOTF visit was a Tuesday – generally the lesser-anticipated night for a big crowd compared to a Friday anywhere in the state.
But the move to a Tuesday only seemed to psych The Herd up more.
“It’s a challenge. But we’ve taken it and made it into something that’s normal,” Morgan Struss said.
“We can totally do this,” sister Mia figured. “Yes, it’s a Tuesday. But we’re The Herd. We got it.”
Leaders have an eight-year library of cheers, chants, dances and more to draw from, to go with ideas they’ve cooked up for this school year.
Leaders made sure to tell us this year they have added four new dances to the repertoire. And those were folded nicely into a night of what we’ve come to expect from near-annual trips to “The Woods.”
“We love to keep stuff, but we always like to think outside the box, get new things in and keep some of the old things,” Aalfs said. “And sometimes we'll bring back other things that we've taken out. It’s kinda like a cycle.”
Considering again this was a Tuesday night, the stands were filled – not just the student section, but both sides of the court – which makes sense with the perspective that a school with just more than 400 9th-12th grade students sold 1,200 Herd T-shirts this year to fund the section, provide for local families in need and fund scholarships.
“Neon Night” predictably was a hit, not just with the nearly 200 high schoolers filling their set of bleachers, but also the 30 or more middle school and younger students who formed a “Junior Herd” next to them.
Following a lights-out introduction of the home team, there were cheers for individual players and some kind of activity during every timeout and quarter break until the end of a 22-point win. Halftime included a senior class dance and a five-minute mashup of signing and grooving. Another new addition came at the end of the game, when students formed a long tunnel for the team to leave the court – and then joined together at midcourt one more time for The Herd’s signature “B-U-C-K-S Bucks!” chant.
Back to every year being “different.” Leaders had a tough time putting it into words at first before settling on “effortless” to describe the enthusiasm and cohesiveness of this year’s Herd. And frankly, we could tell the difference too as every student in the stands from front to top seemed engaged and having fun from warmups through the final buzzer.
“(This year) it's truly a feeling of unity,” Ruth added. “You don't understand how amazing it feels just looking up into those stands and just seeing everybody. I'm down on the floor, I'm saying my cheers, I'm leading everybody, and it's so great just seeing everybody all stacked up.”
Be like Buchanan
Take some of these tips from The Herd:
Find a teacher, find a friend: The Herd absolutely benefits from that trio of teachers – “shepherds” – who are dedicated to giving their time and whatever else the section needs. That, and administrative support, go a long way in helping a section get started and need to be cultivated. At the same time, it doesn’t take a lot of student power to get something going. Find a friend, or a few, tell other students you have a plan for the game coming up and just show up and do your thing. Do that once or a few times, and something is bound to take root and grow.
Open the gates: Herd leaders want anyone and everyone from all grades, friend groups, teams and clubs, etc., to be involved – and that’s part of its allure. Tuesday’s visit included something of a welcome with “MHSAA” painted on students’ backs, and one of the students had been at the school all of a week – but already had been pulled into a section meeting and Herd Snapchat. “Everybody's accepted at Buchanan, and we don't exclude anybody,” Ruth said. “It feels so nice to have everybody around. The more people, the more energy and spirit that I feel when we're having meetings and games and everything.”
Embrace trial and error. Because it’s fun: Not every chant or cheer or song is going to work. And that’s fine. Most great discoveries come after the first try. As long as ideas are reasonable, try them out. It’s a great way to find a section identity, and also to keep people engaged in coming up with ideas to help build it.
Make a plan: Once you’ve got a few ideas for theme nights, or a few cheers that have worked and taken hold, make a plan for game night – especially big ones where you’re hoping to get a lot of students to join in. That way you’re not left trying to figure out what’s next on the fly, and your classmates will get hooked on being part of something organized and well-led.
They said it best
Embrace the opportunity: “Come in with an open mind,” Smith said. “Don't be like, ‘That's lame. I'm too cool for that.’ What's the worst that will happen? People will laugh. Laugh with them. In the end you're actually enjoying yourself – you're having more fun than those people judging you.”
Trust me: “I always viewed (The Herd) as an icon, like what people go to see, and I never viewed it as something to do,” Scurlock said. “I always went there to watch them, or I was playing basketball. This year it was different. Last year I was behind them in the stands, going with them, but I wasn't consistent with it. Now that I’m in it, I wish I did it before. I regret it a lot. … I’ll ask my friends if they want to do this or that (with The Herd), and they’ll say they, ‘Nah, I don’t want to do that.’ I say, ‘Trust me, you do. You just don’t realize it.’”
Great expectations: “I started two years ago, and just looking at the class that had graduated that year (in 2018), that had started everything, that class was full of a lot of my friends and I felt very inspired looking at them,” Ruth said. “So I felt like this year, I really had to own up to that and say, ‘Hey, listen.’ I need to do what they did.”
They’ve got next: “When we go into traveling pep rallies, we're like, ‘Hey, this is going to be you someday. You're going to have to fill our shoes eventually.’ We're just trying to prepare them as much as possible so it will be a fun time for them.” Johnson said of the younger students coming up. “Whenever we say a chant, like ‘Do you know this chant?’ They're like yeah, and they start doing it. So it's just exciting. They just know us and know all the chants and what we do.”
Next stop on BOTF: We will finish the 2020 BOTF tour at Zeeland East with tonight’s boys basketball game against Hamilton. Our coverage of that trip will be posted to Second Half on Monday, and social media voting will begin Tuesday and continue through Thursday. The Battle of the Fans IX champion will be announced Feb. 21.
The Battle of the Fans is sponsored in part by the United Dairy Industry of Michigan.
PHOTOS: (Top) Buchanan students cheer on their classmates during Tuesday’s boys basketball game against Watervliet. (Middle) Senior Carter Aalfs gets plenty of air while leading the section’s roller coaster. (Photos by Jessica Elliott.)