Wake Forest needs more school spirit

My first pair of shoes had little Demon Deacons, and my first sporting event was a Wake Forest football game. Growing up as a die-hard Deacs fan in North Carolina, I knew I was one of a small faction who cared about Wake Forest.

I had no idea that when I myself finally got to Wake, I would once again be among the minority – the select few that passionately cared about Wake Forest’s tradition, school spirit, and sporting events.

I quickly realized that here at Wake Forest, Individualism and personal gain far outweigh desires for community and school spirit. There is no binding agent holding us all together, and so we separate into our own little cliques: Greek, Student Union, athletics, pure academics, or things like debate teams. School spirit and community go by the wayside in this process, as everyone is separated and isolated from our student body as a whole.

This individualistic culture is why the student section at football games is empty, the Joel is never full, and few people follow any of our sports news. In turn, keeping our sporting events free of student participation and unification will continue to deter community and school spirit.

Community is a vital aspect of college, and life as a whole. In our increasingly polarized and argumentative world, it can make a huge difference for people to have a chance to all be on the same side, fighting for a common cause and all getting along.

Athletics are a central measurement  of the maximum student body cohesiveness, and sports can also be a method of increasing that sense of community and cheering for a common cause. The issue Wake has is getting students to care, and getting them to know about the games.

It may be said that students don’t care because we aren’t very good athletically right now, or because we have too much work, but here are some examples of nearby schools who are comparably bad or academically challenging that have no problems showing up to their games.

UNC Chapel Hill and Duke: Basketball

Scenes from Krzyzewskiville

Students at these two Tobacco road schools will spend hours – sometimes even camping out for days – in order to get into their respective basketball stadiums. These schools are equally as challenging and highly-ranked as Wake Forest, but they do not seem to have a problem getting to their games.

Of course, they do tend to have more consistently better teams, records and championships than we do, but here are a few schools that do not have such great traditions but still get fans to their games.

University of South Carolina and Vanderbilt University: Football

Despite being at the bottom of the SEC, South Carolina’s Williams Brice Stadium averages attendance of around 80,000. They sell their teams well, and have a massive marketing machine in place that keeps any and all Gamecock fans in the loop through every media outlet available.

Vanderbilt had a bit harder time in the SEC than South Carolina. A combination of lackluster performance on the field and a learned culture of indifference to the outcome of sporting events (sound familiar?) had dropped Vanderbilt’s attendance to the Lowest by far in the SEC.

Enter James Franklin, arguably the most energetic coach in college football. Franklin understood that there is a circle in play when it comes to athletic performance and student interest when you have an uncommitted student body whose tailgates last well into the first half of the games(also very familiar). It is a chicken and the egg argument: Students don’t show to the games, turnout is poor, the team loses home field advantage, recruits don’t want to play for a losing team with no fans, losing the team valuable commitments, and the fans continue to not care because they are not getting better.

Franklin recognized that he had to craft his own college fan base, and in the SEC especially, you need to be loud, and you need to give your team every advantage they can get at home. Franklin went door to door to Fraternity houses, student unions and other campus organizations in a campus wide pitch to rally support. The desire and passion he had was contagious. The Commodores went from a 2-10 season the year before (1 home win), to 6-6 and a bowl appearance (5-2 at home).

This success continued with an 8-4 record the following year, the best record in 30 years, and 3 sellout crowds. This is not to say that students sacrificed their tailgates and social time, they just started and ended them earlier, like every other school.

Back to Wake

No one can argue with the fact that die-hard, passionate fans give teams advantages they would not otherwise have, leading to performances they would not otherwise have. Large fan bases can be generated through outlier performances, such as our 2006 football team’s 11-3 ACC Championship win, but like that season, those fans disappeared.

Dean Shore, an iconic Wake Forest fan and school barber, noticed a trend in the students whose hair he was cutting over the years.

Dean noticed that in the 2000s, when we were good at basketball and had good football seasons, students came to Wake Forest because they loved watching our sports teams. Athletics was among the top reasons people applied and the national recognition Wake attained from their sports was one of the ways people found out about Wake.

Recently, Dean noticed that athletics had dropped off of the list of reasons people came to Wake, while academics and career attainment were much more common reasons for coming to Wake. People sitting in the barber shop rarely know as much as Dean about the Deacon’s sports teams, but the knowledge gap and enthusiasm about our athletics seems to be growing steadily.

While it makes sense to admit students who are academically driven and want to be successful, admitting students who are open about their indifference toward any sense of community or school spirit does not help us grow together as a community, it drives us further apart. That is not the type of alumni base that the school should want to create.

In a time where there is so much tension and polarity among campuses nationwide, sports is a great way to bring people together and unite them, even if it is just for a few hours.  The intangibles that are gained from a feeling of unity and inclusion in a group are so blatantly desirable that our entire nation is having multiple conflicts about marginalization and the need for more inclusion.

In the midst of all of this serious conflict and working to promote change, it’s nice to take a break to do something we all agree is right: cheer on the Deacs!