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Originally Posted by ace
I love student section heckles though, especially when thy are original.
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I had a very positive experience a few nights ago. I had a girls varsity game between two of the smaller schools in our area. It was a Thursday night game, during the Winter break. I wasn't expecting a large crowd.
Was I wrong. This night was girls recreation league night. All the girls in the local recreation league got in free, and there were scrimmages at the halftimes of both the junior varsity, and the varsity game.
There was also a large contingent of home team student fans, mostly boys, in the crowd. According to the Athletic Director, these fans were displaced from their regular bleacher area by the large crowd of recreation girls, and their parents, so they were seated behind the visitor's bench. Certainly a recipe for disaster. Again, I was wrong.
The first thing that I noted was that student section sang the National Anthem, along with the instrumental recording that was played before the varsity game. I had only observed this once in my 27 years of officiating, and that was at another school when the sound system didn't work. The second thing that I noticed was that these fans spent the entire game cheering for their classmates on the home team, and even though they were seated just a few feet behind the visitor's bench, they never once said anything derogatory to the visiting players. This student section was a class act.