GW went to battle last night, faced an epic fight over control of the Orange Line, walked away victorious. Last night’s game was amazing in a number of ways: Damien Hollis scored 25 points, Lasan Kromah continued to play impressively as a freshman, Joe Katuka showed George Mason why it’s good to be tall, and most importantly, the Smith Center was filled with more than 4,000 fans, most of whom were GW students on their feet from the initial toss to the final buzzer.
If you told me a year ago that a basketball game would be associated with the words “impressive,” “good” or “GW students in the Smith Center,” I would have never believed it. So, what happened and how do we keep it going?
The conventional wisdom that GW has no school spirit is dead. In The Hatchet’s article on the outstanding attendance of the game, freshman Caroline Ayes said it best, “Everyone claims there’s not that much school spirit, but everyone’s here, everyone’s dressed up, everyone’s cheering.” There is a lot truth here, the argument that GW lacks spirit was drowned out by the thousands of students who filled the stands last night.
The most obvious lesson is that GW needs to step up the hype around games. The “Beat George Mason” and “Battle of Orange Line” campaigns left a lot to be desired in terms of substance. We don’t have any notable reasons to feel a rivalry with George Mason, and effectively nobody at GW remembered the last time we played them. The truth is it was only the massive amount of attention that mattered, not the specific form of that attention. The gimmicks like the “Battle of the Orange Line” are too simple for GW students to be fooled into true rabid rivalry.
The last point, and most interesting to me, there is a clear connection between the performance of our team and performance of our fans. Hollis said that the energy of the crowd definitely helped the victory, and it was easy to see that a bad turnover or a missed shot could do little to quiet the momentum the team built with thousands of screaming fans behind them. Now we know that the onus is on us as much as the team.
