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It's Fun Again
By John Hawkes

In the first series of articles I wrote last summer, I said the following about the scene on campus the day after Craig Esherick was fired:

"The conversations continued in Darnall and O'Donovan cafeterias, Red Square, the Healy Gates, everywhere the following day. For probably the first time since that Maryland game three years before, and for an entirely different reason, everyone at Georgetown had basketball on their mind again. Whether intentional or not, the firing of Craig Esherick had everyone interested and, in a perverse sort of way, excited about Georgetown basketball for a brief moment in time."

Whether you considered it more of an "exciting play" or a "heartbreaking moment" in the grand scheme of things, the firing of Craig Esherick did provide one of those brief but memorable moments in time that Georgetown fans will undoubtedly remember years from now in a bar. Which is great-when we're all in that bar with our college buddies years from now. And it sure seemed great at the time, at least according to the folks in the Henle Fishbowl and most of the people whose conversations I overheard the following day.

But in the end, not every exciting play, memorable as they may be, is a game-winner. If that were the case, the officials would have stopped our Big East Quarterfinal this year after Brandon Bowman's reverse dunk to open the game.

At the time, my worry was that too many student fans would draw a different kind of analogy-and assume that firing Craig Esherick was the proverbial game-winning shot for Georgetown basketball and student fandom. Yay! We won! To put it another way-that they'd see it as something akin to "Hibbert versus Notre Dame" rather than "Bowman versus UConn".

I'll tell you a story about that Notre Dame game. In the euphoric aftermath of Georgetown's last-second victory over the Fighting Irish, I was standing in the Chinatown Metro Station with a number of friends and fellow Hoya student fans. As we waited for the Red Line train to arrive, a couple of older local fans struck up a conversation that hadn't been relevant to Hoya fans for three years: what did we think of our team's chances at the NCAA Tournament?

As you can imagine, with the jury consisting of about 10 student fans, many wearing blue and gray face paint, none even close to coming off of their emotional high, and the evidence including a 12 and 5-oh who even cares, did you SEE that DUNK???-there was only going to be one answer. Of course we were making the tournament.

It was around this point that I proposed a question to the group that I now consider quite infamous: in about a month and a half, we'd be playing Providence at the MCI Center in our season finale. With the Hoyas clearly on the rise (and surely tourney-bound) and the Friars still winless in the conference, what would the stakes be by the time that March 5th contest rolled around?

Well, I was at the MCI Center on March 5th along with many of my friends. We sure found out what the stakes were. And we learned a lesson the hard way-one exciting play, one memorable moment, one victory in January does not a season make. Somewhere in between rushing the court and hugging people and singing what used to be that song from the Rocky movie/Starbucks ad, we forgot that there was over half a conference season in between us and the NCAA Tournament.

In a way, the day after Craig Esherick was fired, the returning classes of student fans were all standing on that same Metro platform after a big "victory". And as exciting (and even, let's be honest, uncertain) as that moment was for so many students, there was always that lingering danger that by the end of this basketball season, everyone interested in building a strong student fan base would be left shaking their heads like I did at the end of that Providence game thinking "it wasn't supposed to end like this".

As exciting as it was, Roy Hibbert's dunk against Notre Dame wasn't going to box out Randall Hanke, stop Darryl Hill from penetrating, or, yes, get Ashanti Cook to pass the stupid ball to Jeff Green.

As seemingly crucial as it was to rehabilitating Georgetown's student fanbase at the time, Craig Esherick's firing wasn't going to put up flyers for Midnight Madness, print up cheer sheets for the Seton Hall game, or get students to shell out a little extra cash for two home NIT games.

But here's the thing: those flyers did go up for Midnight Madness this year. The Seton Hall game, of all the random games, was a spectacular success thanks to some smart promoting from ESPN Classic and the Athletic Department. And the students-did they ever show up this year, from Midnight Madness to those two NIT games. So how did the students of the post-Burton generation put together such a slam dunk performance in their first year?

They didn't count on Craig Esherick.

They didn't count on Roy Hibbert's game-winning dunk.

They counted on…Jeff Green's mom.

In a certain way, the student fans of Georgetown basketball turned the 2004-2005 season into the "Year of the Non-Game Observation".

I use the term for a reason. As I said, my lasting memories of many Georgetown basketball games come not from events on the court, but from the "Non-Game Observations" I enjoy recapping so much. Years from now, there may not be a "Roy Hibbert" or "Nathaniel Burton" from every Georgetown game I attended or watched. For many casual Georgetown student fans, even remembering those two names may turn out to be a stretch. But there will almost certainly be a story I can tell for most games.

And that's the key: I've always believed that the best type of promotion to bring in a broad audience of student fans-both the die-hards and the die-hard studiers of the 4th floor of Lauinger Library-should first and foremost be less about the chance that the team will win the game than the certainty that students will have a good time at the game and have some stories to remember. It should be less about the possibility that fans will see a spectacular ending than the knowledge that they'll be part of a loud and proud bunch of student fans who all Bleed Hoya Blue together-and share that experience with their classmates.

For Georgetown's student fans, and for the larger campus community, 2004-2005 was a good season. But it was an even better experience. And the stories students could tell! Even students who weren't the biggest basketball fans could make that all-important and ever-elusive "connection" with their basketball team. It wasn't just that team performed well at times on the court-though that always helps. It was that going to games became "fun" again for the average fan. It was that a bunch of loud and proud student fans did take an interest in getting the entire campus to Bleed Hoya Blue.

This was a season in which:

• The phrase "We Are Georgetown" made its triumphant return to the Georgetown campus lexicon thanks to a couple enterprising student fans with a t-shirt design and a dream. And the Roman numeral "III" was sported on the backs of everyone from pickup basketball players in Yates to girls with Ugg boots in Red Square, not to mention the cheering masses at the MCI Center.<.li>
• Two more enterprising student fans with a design and dream gave us Hoya Bands, the blue and gray wristbands that showed up everywhere from the MCI Center concourse to North Kehoe Field on the wrists of die-hard fans. Not only do Hoya Bands improve school spirit and provide money for the Georgetown Athletic Department, they're the perfect way to show your true colors at the non-GU grad school of your choice (I highly recommend trying them at George Washington).
• A fortuitous combination of Survivor, Starbucks commercials, and a seven-foot center gave the student section it's most inspired cheer of the season-and it didn't even take a cheer sheet to come up with it! ROY!-ROY! ROY! ROY!-ROY! ROY! ROYYYYYYYYYY!

Songs with titles like "1984," "It's the End of the End," and "Jeff Green's Mom" became veritable dorm anthems across campus-and one enterprising Hoya alum with a guitar and…a dream…gave Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, and Nelly some company on everyone's party mix tape. And for a brief moment, North Dakota became the new North Jersey on the Hilltop.

The most well-known fan at the MCI Center? Jeff Green's Mom.

Did I mention somebody yelled out "Bad Brandon" at a game?

What all of these things have in common-other than the surprising recurrence of enterprising individuals with a dream-is that on the surface they have nothing to do with the basketball games being played on the court at the MCI Center. That's why they're called "Non-Game Observations". But the reality is that when it comes to building a strong student fan base and making sporting events a part of campus life, these sort of things are crucial to success.

Above all, this was a season in which everyone-whether the most loyal of the die-hard student fans, or that guy's neighbor who studies organic chemistry and couldn't tell between Jeff Green and his mother-had a story to tell, or an experience to share, about Hoya basketball. Some of them might have an experience they can share even though they never went to a game, but did have something that sounded like a Bowling for Soup song seared into their brain thanks to their blue wig-wearing neighbor in McCarthy Hall.

When it comes right down to it, building a strong student fan base means getting everyone involved-all the die-hards and all the studious neighbors, if you will. Not everybody responds in a Pavlovian fashion to hearing the words "Syracuse University". Not everybody "gets" the Princetown offense. And not everybody in the student section at the MCI Center is there for just a basketball game. Heck, I'm not there for just a basketball game. If I wanted "just a basketball game" I could travel two blocks from my apartment to the Smith Center.

The one thing every student is looking for when they step through the gates at the MCI Center, I believe, is for an experience, a story to tell later on-put simply, to HAVE FUN.

At the end of the regular season, after I'd figured out the stakes of that Providence game, I wrote this:

"I want to end the final recap I do this season by saying to all of the student fans I've gotten to know this year, the ones I don't know, and the ones who thanks to way too much body paint and way too little clothing, I won't be able to forget for a long long time: Great job. It's fun again."

Not only is it "fun" again in the student section, it seems to be a lot more fun on campus every day of the season. I understand now why I get comments from alums and fans telling me that my recaps make them feel like they're right there in the MCI Center even though they're hundreds of miles away. Because the stories that my friends on campus tell me-the ones about "We Are Georgetown" shirts in Yates and "Jeff Green's Mom" playing in the Southwest Quad-make me fell like I'm still a student at Georgetown.

In a sense, Georgetown students have finally brought a little bit of the student section back to campus. And gradually, these students, these stories, these experiences, are spreading.

(To be continued.)