I’m glad it’s over. It’s been tough having all these eyes focused on the place I call home. All of a sudden, there was an added buzz, an energy and throngs of people invading the spaces I was used to having to myself. But now that it’s over, I won’t have to deal with it for another year. Thank goodness Spirit Night is over.
When I’m not writing for this paper, I’m serving in my other role as the director of Triton Tide. I serve in a position where my express purpose is to encourage students to get involved with athletic events on campus and to take pride in their university. So you’d think Spirit Night would be something that I would be thrilled about, but it’s not that simple.
It’s true that on Spirit Night, UCSD matched the attendance figures of the past eight home games combined, and that there was a definite increase in the enthusiasm level in RIMAC Arena, but that alone does not create the UCSD I want to see. I heard some very interesting comments last Friday, one of the most well-intentioned being, “”Wouldn’t it be great if every night were Spirit Night?””
Quite simply, the answer is no.
I can’t tell you how frustrating it is for someone with a genuine passion and interest in the teams here at UCSD to sit through a night like Spirit Night. Several times during the night, I heard the “”De-fense”” chant when we had the ball, listened to UCSD students scream when we were trying to shoot free throws and saw such a general lack of comprehension that I fully expected to be asked, “”Are we the guys in red, or are they?””
The next night, our basketball teams played again, and the only people in attendance were those that really cared. The questions I had heard behind me in the stands the previous night — “”Do blue and gold stripes make me look fat?”” and “”Do you think number 24 is single?”” (They don’t and he’s not) — were gone. Saturday night, I heard the more familiar questions: “”Does the women’s team’s substitution pattern make any sense?”” (Not at all) and “”Should [UCSD men’s head coach Greg] Lanthier or [UCSD women’s head coach Judy] Malone be fired first?”” (I’d be fine with both of them gone).
Spirit Night is nice, but it doesn’t really measure spirit. A handful of unlucky souls run around their respective colleges decorating with blue and gold to the indifferent stares of their peers, and then microbiology majors are herded like cattle into RIMAC Arena. The winning college is the one who can convince the greatest number of these clueless undergrads that there will be a lecture on the ethical ramifications of artificially induced synaptic reactions being held within the arena instead of a basketball game (congratulations Marshall).
They don’t come for the basketball, they don’t come for the spirit, and unless it’s some perverted sense of college pride that drives them, I honestly can’t say what brings those students who have no interest in basketball to Spirit Night.
I’ll be the first to be excited if one of these unwittingly gathered students finds an interest in sports here at UCSD and decides to keep coming back, but unfortunately it’s all the same faces that I see only one night a year.
Now that the hype is through and the posers have gone home, I’ll clean the blue and yellow hair spray off my seat in the front row and retake my place among the few, the proud and the loyal.
See ya next year?
