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Coopology: The Study of Being Rowdy

February 8, 2013

By Geoff Kimmerly
Second Half editor

ZEELAND – Trent Courtright’s voice was gone, and his face paint mostly had washed away by the end of Friday’s Zeeland East boys basketball game against Muskegon Mona Shores.

He predicted he’d sleep well that night, reveling in another Chix victory and the part he and his classmates played by cheering them on.

It was just another night in “The Coop,” home of Zeeland East’s raucous student cheering section.

“We had a lot of fun out there. We love supporting our guys. It’s all worth it for the Coop,” Courtright said. “We try to keep the intensity up no matter what the score is. We try to keep all the fans in the game.

“We just try to support our guys as much as we can and be as loud as we can.”

Mission accomplished.

Nearly filling a section of stands seemingly cut out of the gym wall just for them, Zeeland East’s students stood roughly 250 strong during Friday’s MHSAA Battle of the Fans II visit. The Coop was the fourth stop on the MHSAA BOTF tour, following Frankenmuth, Vandercook Lake and Ann Arbor Gabriel Richard. The final trip, to Buchanan, is Friday, with voting on the MHSAA Facebook page to begin Feb. 19. The winner will be announced Feb. 22 on Second Half.

Don’t plan on the Coop taking any breaks until then, or for the rest of the season.

Be it during a halftime dance-off or sprints down the sideline after every Chix 3-pointer, just about every member of the Coop spent almost all 70 minutes of Friday’s game jumping, dancing, clapping, singing and chanting.

“If you go to a basketball game and you’re not a basketball fan, we want you to still be entertained,” senior Dan Rebhan said.

“There are a lot of pauses in basketball games, and football games too. We always try to fill those with a cheer, a little chaos – there’s been a couple dances, too.”

The Coop has been a Zeeland East tradition for a number of years, but has built toward this crescendo especially during the last three.

Coop leaders know they’re making an impression because of the comments they’ve received.

After a game at Grand Rapids South Christian in early December – when the traveling Coop was far outnumbered by the home student fans – Zeeland East’s students were greeted after by South Christian parents who applauded them for matching and at times exceeding the volume of the home crowd.

During another game this season, Holland Christian students answered another opposing student section by chanting, “The Coop was better.”

 “Our whole community backs us.  I was at the gas station the other day in Holland, and there were two people in front of me that didn’t know me, and they were like, ‘Did you see that Zeeland East student section?  They were pretty sweet.  I think we should go over and watch one of their games,’” Courtright said. “And I was like (nodding my head and smiling).”

Zeeland East athletic director Tim Ritsema met with the section leaders at the beginning of the school year and told them about his experience as part of the Holland High student section in 1985-86. Ritsema explained that this year’s Coop belonged to these seniors, and it was up to them to make the most of it.

If a class was going to raise the Coop to elite status, these seniors made sense to take that challenge. Back when they were in junior high – and often to the surprise of opposing fans – Elzinga and some classmates would paint up and root on their middle school basketball teams. When Zeeland East finished Class B boys basketball runner-up in 2009, Rebhan and a few of his eighth-grade friends snuck into Breslin Center with high school student tickets, finally getting their first taste of being part of the Coop.

When the Battle of the Fans II was announced early this fall, Ritsema forwarded the information to Coop leaders and told them they should give it a shot.

All seven main leaders play sports – football, baseball, golf and track. The Coop is like their winter sport, and has allowed them to form friendships with classmates they didn’t necessarily know well before.

Zeeland East’s students have developed another tradition over the last two years that they fully expect to continue long after this group of leaders is gone.

The High Five Hallway started during the fall of 2012 as something funny done by a few of the seniors, who on football game days would give each other high fives and yell while intersecting in the hallway that leads to the doors and pathway between Zeeland East and Zeeland West, which sits adjacent to the Chix campus.

Students at the schools share classes throughout the day, so often a number of them are crossing between the two schools. Beginning during football season this fall, Rebhan on game days would re-enter East after his classes at West and begin a 10-second countdown. East students in the High Five Hallway would arrange in two lines facing each other, and spend about two minutes of the eight-minute break high-fiving each other while traveling the winding corridor.

It’s said there’s no drama in the Coop, just plenty of camaraderie. It starts in the High Five Hallway. Could it end with a Battle of the Fans championship banner?

“I was dating a girl from (Zeeland) West and I went over to her house the day after the East-West game. Her dad was talking to me about the Coop for like an hour,” Elzinga said. “He didn’t mention a thing about the game, except for that we won.  I was like, ‘West played really well,’ and he said “Yeah, and you guys looked like you were having a lot fun.’”

Subway is a sponsor of this season's Battle of the Fans II contest. 

PHOTO: (Top) The 250-member Coop takes its place in the end zone bleachers during Friday's game against Muskegon Mona Shores.  (Middle) Trent Courtright (#14) leads the Coop in one of its many in-game cheers.  (Video Above) The High Five Hallway, as captured by students, before its Feb. 5 basketball game.  (Photos courtesy of Kurt Van Koevering, Zeeland Record.)

5 Ways the Blue Crew Has Us 'Believin'

February 3, 2017

By Geoff Kimmerly
Second Half editor

PETOSKEY – What once was one of the most raucous gyms in the northern Lower Peninsula had grown hushed as one of Michigan’s proudest student sections slowly fell away.  

Hopefully Petoskey’s opponents didn’t get used to the silence.

The Blue Crew, a finalist for the inaugural Battle of the Fans in 2012, is back after all but disappearing the last few years – and hosted the latest BOTF tour stop Wednesday for its boys basketball game against Sault Ste. Marie.

The breakdown: The Blue Crew is rooted in generations of support going back to the school’s old Central Gymnasium, an arena straight out of “Hoosiers” where 1,500 fans for years packed to the rafters in support of their teams. A new school and a new gym became home to the Northmen in 2002, and that move served as the catalyst for creation of the “Blue Crew” by the school’s student council. The section thrived for more than a decade, but over the last few years for a few reasons discussed below, dwindled. But it’s been rebuilt – leaders have even pulled out of retirement advisor Karen Starkey, wife of longtime boys hoops coach Dennis and a former counselor at the school – and that well-known energy has returned to fuel the next generation of Petoskey athletes.

We met with seniors Ashlyn Kartes, Stuart Green and Emme Williams and juniors Danny Kolp, Isabella Rowe and Jake Lee during a night dedicated to raising cancer awareness. See below for our video and five reasons the Blue Crew is rising again.

1. What’s old is new again.

When we visited with the Blue Crew in 2012 during the first Battle of the Fans finalists tour, we learned about a student section steeped in history. But over the last few years, the section more or less disappeared. As this year’s leaders tell it, the Crew was completely broken-down last winter, with a lack of leadership and a mood that discouraged participation because seniors did what they wanted and expected everyone else to fill in behind them. Football games this fall were similarly tepid. But everything changed after most of the section’s new leadership attended an MHSAA Sportsmanship Summit on Nov. 9 in Traverse City, where they loaded up on energy and ideas. On the car ride home, they created a new Blue Crew Twitter page and had a number of followers before they even arrived back at their school. The revival was on. Volleyball games started taking off, and hockey and basketball have been big draws this winter. Petoskey girls and boys basketball teams at all three levels had games across three gyms Wednesday – the main gym, auxiliary and the gym at the old school – but it was obvious students were trickling into the section after their games. Nearly 200 showed for a midweek game, even as the junior varsity girls were playing at the same time as the varsity boys. It's a lesson for hundreds of schools across our state: you too can grow a student section, and all it takes is a group of motivated leaders to get it started. 

2. They’re one big family.

Whereas by the end of last year seniors ruled and few others cared to be a part, the attitude in the Blue Crew is much more inclusive this winter. Leaders during our trip emphasized multiple times how much they adore their underclassmen, who might make up a majority of the section – there are likely more freshmen than seniors most nights. It’s changed the mood in the school’s hallways as well. Meanwhile, those younger students are showing excitement about continuing to grow the section in the future, while this year’s seniors are excited they’ve been able to restart a legacy and leave something behind. Gone are rules about seniors in front – an informal group of guys who attend most games take some of those spots because they lead cheers, but whoever shows up first gets the best seats. “We kinda went back and forth on this because we have seniors in our Blue Crew and in our leadership, and of course you’ve waited the four years (to be up front). The people before us were really into the seniors in the front row, so we were raised with that. But once we sat back on it, the people that get there early are the ones who are going to cheer the loudest, and they want to be there. The underclassmen who get there an hour early before game time are the ones who are going to cheer the loudest, and that’s what we want.”

3. They’re in the game. 

The Blue Crew is a student section in the most traditional sense. While there were a few bells and whistles during our trip – the rollercoaster, a traditional “Don’t Stop Believing” performance arm-in-arm – this is a section that is most focused (and rightly so) on the game being played. The chants started from the first basket (see moment in video with streamers thrown into the air) and didn’t stop until the game’s end. Cheers may have started up front, but the section as a whole was engaged – which made the Crew stick out for more than just the pink shirts they were wearing.

4. This section doesn’t just cheer for the boys.

Again, there were games at all three levels going on all over Petoskey on Wednesday. But 40 students filled the Crew at the start of the 5:30 p.m. girls varsity game, and that continued to grow steadily as the other games were completed and players and fans moved on to the main events of the night. This is all by design; as the leaders went about rebuilding the section, they came up with 20 theme nights so they had one for every home varsity game for both the boys and girls. They also made sure to spread what were expected to be the most popular to both boys and girls games to guarantee maximum support for both teams. What’s more, the varsity players cheer for each other. Kolp and Lee start on the boys team – Kolp, in fact, is considered one of the top players in the northern Lower Peninsula – and they are sure-thing regulars at the girls games, Lee often dressed as Gandalf from “Lord of the Rings” and the 6-foot-9 Kolp as the section’s tallest cheerleader rooting on his sister Megan and her teammates.

5. They’ve mixed the old and the new

As noted, the ode to the band Journey has survived the rise, fall and rise again of the Blue Crew, and the section lives in the same far corner of the gym and continues to receive the wise counsel of Starkey. But the new has been important too. Just about every student section has theme nights, but Petoskey’s leaders worked hard to do something just a little different to make each unique – Frat/Sorority Night included giant Greek letters for “PHS” and Wacky/Tacky Tuesday was a new spin on bad fashion. They’re also taking advantage of social media, using Twitter to connect with classmates across a school with nearly 1,000 students – for example, a freshman DM’d to suggest a toga night idea that made the final list, and a Twitter poll was used to pick from four possible slogans for Wednesday’s pink shirts. The school also brought back a cheerleading team this fall after 12 years without one, and the Blue Crew hopes to work with that team as support continues to build.

In their words

New and improved: “The atmosphere is totally different (from last year),” Green said. “People didn’t really want to cheer. Maybe they wanted to but they felt like it was out of their element – where now, there’s an atmosphere that you show up, you cheer as ridiculous as you want, and it’s accepted.”

We watched; we joined: “A lot of other student sections in our conference are good. We’ve been surrounded by that. So after going to the (Sportsmanship Summit), we knew we could do that,” Kartes said. Recalling watching last season’s BOTF champion Traverse City West at a 2016 District Final, Williams added: “Just seeing that, we all just realized playing in front of our Blue Crew is not easy. And that’s what our goal is.”

All are welcome: “(Wednesday) we went around to the lunchrooms and passed around candy, and we were like, ‘Hey, come to the game. Bring your friends,'" Williams said. “Once everyone is in the student section, even if you don’t know the person, it’s like you’ve known them for so long. It’s like one big family there, and I think that’s what makes us so special.”

Next stop on BOTF: We'll finish the 2017 BOTF tour at Frankenmuth for tonight's boys basketball game against Millington. Click for coverage of our visits to Boyne City on Jan. 13, Traverse City West on Jan. 20 and Charlotte on Jan. 28.

The Battle of the Fans is sponsored in part by the United Dairy Industry of Michigan.

PHOTOS: (Top) Petoskey's Blue Crew roots on its boys basketball team Wednesday against Sault Ste. Marie. (Middle) Blue Crew members huddle in the middle of the section, creating a sea of pink streamers. (Photos by Larry Tracy/ CMA Action Photography.)