Home > John Hawkes Archive

"The Founding Fathers" (Part 3)
(Or How 'The Ambassador,' The Grizzly Bear, The Kid Who Ranted and Raved as if He Had Contracted Rabies, And a Whole Cast of Diehards Stormed a Constitutional Convention and Finally Got to Take Hoya Blue to a Whole 'Nother Level (But Had No Comment at the Time--After All, There Was an Election to Be Won))

Michael R. Segner was the closest thing to an "outsider" on the Hoya Blue Executive Board this year. He was the only person on the board that wasn't either on Kurt's original five-person list on Hoyatalk, or an extremely close friend of one of the members.

Not knowing him well at the time, it only seemed to add to his "outsider" image when I learned that he hadn't even voted for Kurt for President of Hoya Blue at the election. He had told me of his involvement in several Hoya Blue events the previous year, and I'd concluded that he had probably formed a close relationship with the previous board and respected the job they'd done.

Nope. I'll let Michael tell this one:

"After the bear and mop top candidates had given their speeches they received a fairly jubilant applause. A slight melancholic depression hit me then as I was worried that the great GUHoya007 would not be victorious. Only a couple of minutes after the meeting was I then informed by [his roommate] Dan that the mop top was indeed 007, wearing the III shirt like he had mentioned and the candidate that I had voted for...who had not even bothered to show up was not. How could I have known that the quiet kid barely able to give an election speech was the 007 of the talkboards who ranted and raved as if he had contracted rabies?"

The entire Hoya Blue election-stall time, vote time, time for small talk at the end-lasted under an hour. One hour to completely alter the structure and destiny of Georgetown's official school spirit organization. One hour to suddenly give a group of students who'd fashioned themselves as a sort of unofficial spirit group a lot of official clout.

Kurt's last post in the election-related thread captured the sentiment among the "new" Hoya Blue as the crowd left McDonough Arena that night:

"It's good that we have that out of the way now and it's time to get to work. We've talked and complained a lot, now it's time to let our actions speak louder than our words. We need to give everything we have to this and make Hoya Blue the best it's ever been. Let's get it done.

WE ARE GEORGETOWN!!!"

If you're scoring at home, that was five uses of "we" and three exclamation points.

The Banquet

Five uses of "we" and three exclamation points hardly make for an event worthy of an anniversary though. In fact, the actual "event" all of the students had been gearing up for over the previous three weeks turned out to be a completely inconsequential farce.

So-to get back to the original question here-why celebrate the anniversary of a non-event?

It's worthy of celebration, I think, not because of the non-event, but rather what that non-event represented for Hoya Blue.

The ostensible purpose of holding meetings about Hoya Blue in the first place was to help the club transition from an "unofficial" school spirit group to an organization recognized by the Student Activities Commission. Hoya Blue was, in essence, going "official".

Going "official" wasn't just a SAC thing though. One inescapable conclusion that did emerge from my subsequent conversations with members of the Athletic Department was that the relationship between McDonough and Hoya Blue needed to change. If Hoya Blue had struggled in its attempts to promote school spirit on campus, at least part of that was because they weren't getting a lot of help.

Hoya Blue's biggest problem over the previous few years, I felt, was that it had a rapidly declining "brand name". What had once been the club I was the most excited to join as a freshman four years earlier was now causing students to write open letters to the Athletic Department calling Hoya Blue a waste of time.

I believe now that on that May night a year ago in Team Room A, the relationship between Hoya Blue and McDonough started to change-and the club's "brand name" now is as strong as it has ever been.

I attended the Hoya Hoop Club Banquet a few weeks ago. I sat near two tables reserved for a group of invited guests-the current and future Executive Boards of Hoya Blue. Later that night, Coach Thompson would devote a good chunk of his remarks to thanking the members of Hoya Blue for their tireless efforts throughout the year. Several hundred attendees joined in a prolonged round of applause. If you weren't there, you've probably heard the story, since just about every member of the Hoya Blue Executive Board wrote about it over the next few days.

It's good to be appreciated.

The truth is Hoya Blue deserves the appreciation for any number of reasons. I was reminded of one reason while reading the comments of one Hoya Blue board member after the Banquet.

Just as Kurt Muhlbauer's first impulse after being elected the new President of Hoya Blue had been to announce it was time to get to work, Ray Borgone's comments after the Banquet spoke to the work ethic that has characterized the "Founding Fathers" of the new Hoya Blue this year:

"Motivated me even more to work hard to keep getting people out to games and to keep trying to drum up more and more support for the program."

The Core Group

Ultimately, all of the hard work "The Ambassador" and his compatriots put into "campaigning" turned out to be a moot point when it came to the actual Hoya Blue elections. But there was a far greater significance to all of the email chains and the somewhat-creepy bull session in the dark ICC Galleria.

Whether it was on the Hoyatalk board, Instant Messenger, in line at the MCI Center, at a dinner meeting, or in someone's Henle apartment, there had been throughout that school year a core group of dedicated students who dreamed of improving school spirit on campus, if they could only get involved in Hoya Blue.

The thing was, not all of the members of that core group knew each other.

Until the Hoya Blue elections.

The Barbecue

I've been asked a number of times recently whether I was planning on writing a year-end recap of Hoya Blue's 2005-2006 "season".

I wouldn't know where to start. One of the consequences of having a student spirit group that's suddenly everywhere on campus (Coach Thompson frequently jokes that Hoya Blue needs to go study or get to class) is that it's impossible to keep up with events. It would be a monumental task for me to even approach a comprehensive recap of everything Hoya Blue has done this year.

I did, however, approach this article knowing that it would be the last one to appear during this school year. Instead of writing a season-long recap however, I want to share with you the story of another relatively minor event.

Last Sunday (April 29th, 2006), Hoya Blue held its final official event of the school year, a pre-game barbecue before the women's lacrosse game against Loyola College.

I realized I'd also been around for (and written a column about) Hoya Blue's first barbecue of the year, way back on the first Saturday in September. It occurred to me as I looked around the barbecue site on the last weekend in April how much it recalled that first barbecue. I got to thinking about how even though Hoya Blue had grown by leaps and bounds this year, and had expanded its membership beyond even its own wildest projections, the personalities at the center of the club had remained the same since back in September…

…well, actually, since back in May when they all came together for the first time at the elections.

Kurt Muhlbauer, "the 007 of the talkboards who ranted and raved as if he had contracted rabies," was still playing the role of organizer in Hoya Blue-when I walked out to the Multi-Sport Facility, he was the first member I recognized, working feverishly to get the fire going on the grill. He was recently elected to a second year as President of Hoya Blue. Once again, he ran without serious opposition.

Thomas Ryan remains a carnival barker of sorts. He could have been forgiven for arriving late to the barbecue. The previous day, his apartment had played host to a party stretching through nearly all of Georgetown Day, which had been attended at some point by nearly every significant member of Hoya Blue. Just about every major Hoya Blue party during the school year, in fact, was held at Tom's apartment. Many people commented on how many girls showed up. For all of his apprehensions about his qualifications, Tom was instrumental in drafting Hoya Blue's Constitution and writes an okay Excel spreadsheet (I've seen it). He also shaves more often these days, and keeps his temperament under control.

Ray Borgone is taking over the Excel spreadsheet next year as Hoya Blue's treasurer. He's consistently lived up to his promise back in May 2005 to get more involved in Hoya Blue because there would be a lot more work put into the club. Although he wasn't technically signed up for a shift at the barbecue, Ray showed up in the morning to wheel the grill and supplies down the hill from the Leavey Center. After the barbecue, I helped him co-pilot the cart of supplies back up the hill. He said he'd tell me when we needed to change directions. When I couldn't hear his voice over the sound of the wheels rolling on asphalt, we switched to hand signals.

Piloting the grill back to Leavey along with Kurt was Ray's freshman year floor-mate Dmitriy Zakharov, an oft-fatigue clad die-hard who I'd met for the first time at the Hoya Blue elections.

Steve "The Ambassador" Fraser somewhat predictably ended up with the most grassroots of all positions in Hoya Blue-Dorm Captain for LXR. He's currently working on a paper on Organizational Change for a class…using the Hoya Blue election as a case study. I met him a few weeks ago for an interview in the dark ICC Galleria, a few yards away from where he had held the election strategy session the previous year.

Matt Kamenski, not surprisingly despite the beautiful sunny day, was the only member of Hoya Blue at the barbecue wearing sunglasses. Aside from his formal role as "Flag Man" at men's basketball games and the occasional lacrosse contest, Matt moonlights as the D.J. for Hoya Blue road trips…where one of the signature songs on his mix tape is "California Love".

When he returned from St. Petersburg and watching the Hoya Blue election from afar, Steve Medlock yanked the Second Place ribbon right out from under the no-show Presidential candidate, becoming Hoya Blue's Vice President. When he isn't burning hot dogs these days, Steve is leading the transition between the current and future Hoya Blue boards. He's also taking suggestions for a new Hoyatalk board name.

Jimmy McAndrews, the High School senior who had already met a few of the new Hoya Blue's Founding Fathers and couldn't wait until the next season, is now a self-described "Sketchy Disciple of the Almighty Shotgun Draw" and a regular fixture at Hoya Blue events. The last time I saw him at the barbecue, he was lighting his cigarette on the charcoal grill.

There are dozens of freshmen like Jimmy who showed up at Georgetown in August and were greeted by a new passionate group of Hoya Blue volunteers. For the first time in several years, Hoya Blue was actively reaching out to students and offering them a chance to be active members of the club. If it was a core group of students running the club, they certainly weren't bashful about letting the core grow even bigger. Here we were in late April, and many of those freshman were not only still coming to events-they were volunteering, they were bringing friends, and in some cases, they had just been elected to Executive Board positions.

Michael R. Segner, the man who mistakenly didn't vote for Kurt Muhlbauer in the Hoya Blue elections, will next year be his Vice President. Some of the planning for the final barbecue of the year fell to Michael, and while we were hanging out near the grill, he gave me his assessment of how the event was going.

Hoya Blue had greatly overestimated how many people were going to show up for the barbecue. But, Michael told me, they had a good core group of people there that always seemed to show up for events. He paused for a second, shrugged, and said he guessed that was a good thing.

A good core group of people.

If there's anything we should remember last year's Hoya Blue elections for, it's for reminding us just how much a good core group of people can accomplish if given the chance.