4. Defensive cheering.
At a typical men’s basketball game there are three groups who lead cheers. First there are the cheerleaders. They dance, shake their pom poms and try to get the crowd to cheer for their team. The there is the Green Machine led by Doc Nix. The Green Machine plays music during timeouts, and key plays and tries again to pump of the audience. Finally there is the group of people that organize cheers in the stands, they to try their best to get fans involved. However, with three “cheering” groups this leads to an all out mess.
First of all you have the repetitiveness of the cheerleaders: Some of the cheers in include yelling “Mason take it to the hoop” “All the way down the court Let’s go” and “ Mason shoot for 2 or 3” and the they repeat the same cheers five minutes later. The there is the green machine, which is the best pep band in the nation by the way, is constantly playing during the game. Some times the music is so loud that it drowns out the cheerleaders, which may not be a bad thing, but it still leads to the overall disorganization. Finally there are the groups of students who try to get their own cheers, and jeers started. Take graduating senior Bryan Dombrioski, who was one of the candidate for this years Mason Majesty. Dombro, as his friends call him leads cheers like
“ gimme a B-O-N-E-R, what’s that spell BONER, what does that mean? Hard –d” and others that I probably should not post online and are definitely NSFW.
Some may find his cheers offensive but he and his groups of friends are doing their best to get the audience involved. When asking students at games what they though about Dombro cheering, many said that they thought it was offensive. However I think they are quite clever. It is bettering than standing there on your cellphones and not cheering at all, which I see most students doing. However the disorganization of cheers may be bad at basketball games, but the fact the there are games were no one is cheering makes me sad.