SAC Sound-Off: Drawing the Line at Our First Summit
October 9, 2012
By Kiersten Mead
Saginaw Swan Valley junior
Every two years, the Michigan High School Athletic Association conducts Sportsmanship Summits aiming to instruct athletes on how to be the best examples of sportsmanship in their communities, both while competing and cheering on their teams. Participants experience a variety of sessions, including one directed by members of the MHSAA Student Advisory Council. The first summit of this fall was Monday in Lansing; summits also will be held in Warren, Gaylord and Kalamazoo.
On the morning of the first Sportsmanship Summit of 2012, I was trying my hardest to not let my nerves and excitement get the best of me.
As a member of the MHSAA Student Advisory Council, my role is to listen to and understand the points of view of student athletes, and share them with the MHSAA. I had spent the day before the summit preparing with the rest of my team, but I knew the sessions would be a learning experience for all of us. I was fortunate enough to be in a group with three seniors: Elle Lehman, Thye Fischman, and Matt Freeman, which made me feel a little more confident.
Our portion of the summit was to discuss the “gray areas” of sportsmanship. Our group knew that if we just sat there and gave some sort of lecture or speech, people would be bored to tears.
So instead, we did it in an interactive way. We started by having everyone stand on the outside of a roped-off circle. We began asking questions – and if an answer applied to them, they were told to step over the line.
We started with random questions, like asking who preferred the University of Michigan over Michigan State. Slowly, we worked our way into sportsmanship-centered topics. We asked the more “black and white” questions that everyone generally saw eye-to-eye on first. These led into others like, “Is it okay, as a player, to flip off fans?” or even, “Is it considered bad to spit at a referee?” If people thought that either “crossed the line” into bad sportsmanship, they were asked to step over the line.
Eventually, we started asking our “gray area” questions. For example, we asked if yelling “air ball” or “you, you, you” after a player makes a mistake is crossing the line. After everyone made their decisions, we asked them to share their thoughts and even personal experiences or stories.
I absolutely loved this part of it! I really enjoyed hearing what people thought on certain topics, especially when I didn’t necessarily see things the same way. My favorite part of our session, though, was hearing all of the personal stories. There was always at least one person in each group that had his or her fair share of them. I would not have traded my job for anything! Although, I do think it would have been really cool to have taken part in the other sessions.
The idea of tweeting throughout the day with the hash tag “BOTF” (signifying Battle of the Fans) also was a lot of fun! It resulted in a lot of people following and connecting with others they would never have otherwise gotten to know. By the time the third group (of four) had entered our session, it was clear people were starting to get more comfortable with each other.
In our session especially, there were quite a few things that surprised me. In some of the more “black and white” situations, there would sometimes be one person who thought some things were okay, while the rest of the group disagreed. It also surprised me how we would have a group very split on an issue, while another group would all see it the same way. When it’s all said and done though, I think people understood the message we were trying to convey.
In the end, the idea of the entire summit was that all of us should always be displaying positive sportsmanship. Many people told us there were things that their student sections do, that they know are wrong, yet they do them anyway. The point of this summit was to understand the importance of stepping up, being a leader, and leading by example. Nothing will change unless someone decides to take charge and change things for the better.
My hope is the people who attended the summit at the Lexington Hotel in Lansing walked away understanding their views of something aren’t the only ways of seeing it. It’s always important to keep an open mind.
And to future participants of these sportsmanship summits, I say be prepared to get involved. Feel free to have your own opinion, whether it’s popular or not. Share your stories. But most of all, have fun!
Kiersten Mead, Saginaw Swan Valley junior
- Sports: Bowling, competitive and sideline cheer
- Non-sports activities: Student government (Class Secretary), SADD (Students Against Destructive Decisions), Drama, Business Professionals of America
- Favorite classes: English and Drama
- What's next: Mead is considering careers in orthodontics and pediatric orthopedics, with early college possibilities including Saginaw Valley State and the University of Michigan.
- Shining sports moments: Being named "Team All-Star" by her Swan Valley cheer team; finishing undefeated in bowling, her bowling team's Regional title and rolling a 280 in a tournament.
- Pump-up jams: For bowling, "Slow and Low" by the Beastie Boys, because it totally applies (as dorky and random as that is); for cheer, "Live While We're Young" by One Direction.
- Must-see TV: "Criminal Minds"
- Favorite Film: "The Sandlot"
PHOTO: Swan Valley's Kiersten Mead helps direct a session at Monday's MHSAA Sportsmanship Summit. Tune in to Second Half later this week for video detailing the Sportsmanship Summit experience.
Bridgman's 'Orange Crush' Rules the Hive
February 3, 2014
By Geoff Kimmerly
Second Half editor
BRIDGMAN – On a bulletin board in Bridgman coach Mike Miller’s office hangs the numbers 146 and 31 – his boys basketball team’s record at home dating back to the 1995-96 season.
His players take pride in those numbers, updating them within minutes of returning to locker room after the latest win. And that pride extends to the 100-plus students packed into the corner bleachers that rise over the top of the locker room and into the rafters.
Bridgman is a Class C school with only 320 students. But roughly half made up the “Orange Crush” cheering section that piled into “The Hive” on Friday and helped the Bees add another win to the board.
A first-time Battle of the Fans finalist, the Orange Crush has been building one of southwest Michigan’s top cheering sections for half a decade with one goal in mind – to make Bridgman’s recently-constructed gym – renovated in 2012 – an old-fashioned, scary place to travel if you’re an opposing basketball player.
“I grew up with sports, and if you watch a college game – for example, a Michigan State basketball game – or go to Breslin Center, people are terrified. That’s all you hear on TV, and if you go to a game, it’s crazy,” said Bridgman junior Cullen Peters, a member of the boys basketball team who leads the Orange Crush during the football season. “It’s something at the high school level that we wanted to have as well. We’re feared. People are scared to come here.”
Bridgman on Friday was the second stop on this year’s Battle of the Fans III tour. MHSAA staff and Student Advisory Council members will visit Frankfort on Monday, Traverse City West on Friday and then finish at Beaverton on Feb. 14. Public voting on the MHSAA’s Facebook, Twitter and Instagram sites will take place Feb. 18-20, with the Student Advisory Council taking that vote into consideration when selecting the champion.
The winner will be announced on Second Half on Feb. 21 and honored with a championship banner during the Boys Basketball Semifinals on March 21 at Michigan State University’s Breslin Center.
The Orange Crush would love to be there to support its teams – the boys are 8-4 and made the Semifinals in 2010 – although the BOTF competition certainly has stoked the section’s long-standing fire even as Bees fans take pride in being old school.
While certainly there’s a rough agenda going into games, section leaders admit there’s little pre-planning involved. The Crush just asks classmates to show up en masse and follow what unfolds.
Cheers are passed down from year to year, and the section works in concert with a sizable pep band that sits above and the cheerleaders on the adjacent end line.
“The student section shows up to support the Bees. That’s why we stick to tradition,” said junior Matt Starkey, who leads one of the section’s favorite passed-down cheers, “boom-chicka-boom.” “We like to focus on the game and what’s going on in the game.”
The Orange Crush’s initial rise pre-dates this current group of high schoolers, although it is because of tragic circumstances that athletic director John Norton can pinpoint when the section got rolling.
A 2010 senior, Jeff Demko, came to Norton to get his assistance in ramping up the student section’s efforts that basketball season. That included the purchase of Orange Crush T-shirts in advance of the Jan. 5 game.
On the way to the game that night, Demko and classmate Frankie Pipkins were in a car crash and died.
Although the current seniors were in eighth grade, the current leaders had ties to Demko and Pipkins and vividly remember that night. Demko’s Orange Crush shirt hangs to this day in Norton’s office. And his spark for the student section continued in close friend Adam Klug, who kept the Hive buzzing into the 2012-13 school year.
That fall, Bridgman students including current leaders Peters and sophomore Katie Hartzler attended the MHSAA Sportsmanship Summit in Kalamazoo, where a main focus was fan sportsmanship and the previous year’s inaugural Battle of the Fans.
“We had a lot of ideas already … but we ended up learning a lot,” Peters said. “It really helped us take it to the next level. The whole BOTF thing, it really motivated people from the freshman to the seniors. Sometime with a student section you’ll see seniors and juniors getting into it, and the freshman just messing around at the top. The competition aspect just invigorated everyone to pull out even more school spirit than they had and also sportsmanship, what lines to cross or not to cross.”
For example, they may yell “airball,” but they don’t continue past that first missed shot. Or, they’ll chant, “If you’re winning and you know it, clap your hands.” But they don’t follow that with anything about the opponent.
Seniors Jordan Alfredo and Hannah Malevitis were cheerleaders through this fall before deciding to leave the squad so they could spend their final high school winter in the middle of the cheering section’s front rows. And, of course, there’s mascot Buzz, Peters’ freshman brother Logan, who pushes a lever into a fake “TNT” box after every 3-pointer to send Bees fans flying backward.
The section has invigorated the boys basketball team in particular.
Peters remembered running onto his floor for the second game of the season, and the teammate in front of him was so stoked he threw his warm-up lay-up over the backboard. “I’m like, ‘Dude, what’s going on?’ He was so jacked from the student section,” Peters said.
And the leaders can tell when it’s making a difference. Peters said the Bees were second in their area in points given up per game last season, a direct effect of the tough homecourt. Bridgman hosted Decatur on a Tuesday earlier this season and had its lowest Orange Crush turnout of the season – but his Decatur friends said after how it was the craziest atmosphere they’d ever played in.
“When other student sections come to the Hive, we’re constantly trying to do something no matter what’s going on in the game. We’re always cheering,” Alfredo said. “Other student sections get pretty intimidated by that, and that’s pretty cool for us. We’re such a small school, that doesn’t happen very much.”
When Bridgman was named a BOTF finalist, Norton called the five leaders into his office and told them to “spread the word.” Between Twitter and old-fashioned yelling, that didn’t take long.
But even if Bridgman doesn’t win Battle of the Fans III, the Orange Crush is proud it will be showing some purple when highlights are shown during the Basketball Finals on the Breslin Center scoreboard – Bridgman students raised $6,000 for eating disorder treatment Friday in honor of one of coach Miller’s daughters, who received treatment for the disease at Selah House in Anderson, Ind.
Bridgman might be among the smaller BOTF finalists. But it’s impact remains mighty.
“We want to be old-fashioned. You come to Bridgman, you’re going to be scared,” Peters said. “The focus of the game for the student section, and the crowd in general is (to create) a crazy atmosphere and be loud as heck.”
Battle of the Fans III is sponsored in part by the United Dairy Industry of Michigan.
PHOTOS: (Top) Bridgman’s “Orange Crush” put the “A” in YMCA on Friday during the boys basketball game against Niles Brandywine. (Below) Mascot Buzz (freshman Logan Peters) is always on hand to keep the Bees buzzing. (Photos courtesy of Michael VandeZande.)