Logo

5 Ways Charlotte’s Flight Club Soars

January 31, 2017

By Geoff Kimmerly
Second Half editor

CHARLOTTE – “One night to become State Champions.”

On social media and written at the bottom of its itinerary for the night, Charlotte’s Flight Club made perfectly clear what Saturday’s Battle of the Fans visit meant to a student section that while only a few years old has quickly become one of Michigan’s most accomplished – and is striving to become known as the state’s best. 

Students filled stands covering one end of the court at Charlotte’s “Dome” as we enjoyed the third of our five-visit tour on a night saluting local law enforcement.

The breakdown: In two years, Charlotte’s student section has come from nonexistent to become a two-time BOTF finalist. As we learned during our 2016 trip, it was hatched during a series of January 2015 snow days, when student leaders took advantage of the break by meeting and forming a Flight Club to give more support at first to the school’s basketball teams and then to all Orioles athletes. The section gained steam over the course of last school year and especially last winter during a strong start for the boys basketball team, and despite graduating nearly all of its leaders last spring returned in force this fall to become a regular part of student life at the school.

We visited for Saturday’s boys basketball game against DeWitt and met with seniors Jess Ramos, Grant Seavolt, Cassie Cotter, Connor Rosekrans and Ari Beutler. See our video below, followed by five reasons the Flight Club continues to take off.

1. They have been building – literally.

The Flight Club claims to have more props than any student section in the state, and it’s a strong argument. They sadly waved goodbye to the S.S. Flightanic – a rolling boat they featured last season – after it ran aground in storage. But section leaders came back in August with their tools and paint cans ready. They built a giant “bird cage” out of PVC pipe to house Charlotte’s football teams at their field entrance before they busted out before games this fall. They created a second giant tifo (a.k.a. giant banner seen in photo below) that makes trips to most big games. And we enjoyed watching again as a member of the Club popped from the homemade oversized jack-in-the-box rolled out after the third quarter. A fan slip-n-slide set up for an early football game didn’t really take off, but most of the rest have been big winners – including the face-paint station in one corner of the gym where anyone can get made up to further show support.

2. They got organized.

As noted above, the Flight Club is barely two years old but quickly has grown into a force – and especially this school year as it’s become more organized. They received a new “nest” (our word, not theirs), a classroom where they store their many gizmos and gear and plan their work. White boards on one wall were loaded with lists and maps of the gym showing which sections of fans would sit where Saturday, while newspaper clips detailing their successes filled a bulletin board on another wall and a mural created by section co-creator and 2016 graduate Lindsey Carlson hung next to a letter sweater formerly worn by the dad of faculty section adviser Tyler Bartolacci, a 2007 grad. Section leaders now attend meetings every Monday and others as needs arise, created an itinerary for Saturday that was sent around on social media before the game, and members of the section proudly wore around their necks “boarding passes” – not that they needed identifying, but a neat show of solidarity nonetheless. And leaders are still giving “Flight Club” lessons – videos over Twitter to show some of the cheers they’ll use at future events.

3. The pilots guide them home.

Last year, section leaders patrolled in front of the section – “flight attendants” showing the way. Taking the reins during games this year are “pilots,” one on each side of the baseline, standing on risers, megaphones in hand to provide the direction for all to hear and see. On Saturday, new leaders stepped up every quarter to guide the section and unify it for some awesome chants including a drum clap during the first half that will be a highlight of this year’s BOTF tour.

4. They’re making ‘highlights’ along the way.

Most schools with student sections can count on seeing them at football and basketball games. Starting in the fall, the Flight Club selected “highlight games” in every sport to also cheer – and not just for the more popular spectator sports like volleyball or soccer. The Club has cheered at girls and boys swimming & diving meets and at a hockey game this winter despite having only one Charlotte student on a co-op team with Lansing Catholic, Mason and Lansing Christian players. The first highlight game was a girls golf match during the fall, where 10 members of the Club cheered from the clubhouse as their classmates played the ninth fairway. And they packed local Char Lanes for a Neon Out and lots of “Strike, Strike, Strike” for a bowling match. “A lot of kids on the bowling team were really excited to see us there,” Rosekrans said. “They were talking about it the whole next week: ‘Thanks for coming. That was awesome.’”

5. They’ve got P.R.I.D.E.

Purpose. Respect. Integrity. Dedication. Excellence. PRIDE is a school motto, and a large board near the gym doors explains how students should be guided by those qualities in the classrooms and hallways. But Club members also have a lot of pride (the non-acronym meaning) in their school, and have risen as a giant in fan support at a time when Charlotte’s most recognizable sports teams aren’t having a ton of success. Driving their athletes to do their best only makes the Flight Club cheer louder. Students filled multiple spectator buses for football games, load the stands for basketball games, have worked closely with the middle school’s “Junior Flight Club” that also got organized this year, and had no doubts about making another run at Battle of the Fans after making an impressive debut but coming up short of the title in 2016. “Everyone has a ton of fun at the games,” Rosekrans said. “I think they naturally thought, let’s do it again next year.”

In their words

Setting themselves apart: “We kept seeing what we could do to make us champions,” Ramos said. “We wanted to know what would set us apart, and we spent a lot of time thinking about that and trying to see what we did last year compared to this year that we wanted to do differently.”

Memories made: “I made a lot of great memories just through the Flight Club, especially this year with football,” Seavolt said. “It’ been a lot to remember.”

Just say the word: “Get the community involved. People want to come to the games. They just don’t know about it all the time,” Rosekrans said. “Social media. Tell people. Literally, that’s all it is. The power of talking to someone is very underestimated.”

Next stop on BOTF: We'll visit Petoskey for Wednesday’s boys basketball game against Sault Ste. Marie and Frankenmuth for Friday’s boys basketball game against Millington. Click for coverage of our visits to Boyne City on Jan. 13 and Traverse City West on Jan. 20.

The Battle of the Fans is sponsored in part by the United Dairy Industry of Michigan.

PHOTOS: (Top) Charlotte's "Flight Club" chants during a drum clap Saturday. (Middle) Flight Club members hold up two giant tifos during the Battle of the Fans visit. (Photos by Teresa Johns.)

Bridgman's 'Orange Crush' Rules the Hive

February 3, 2014

By Geoff Kimmerly
Second Half editor

BRIDGMAN – On a bulletin board in Bridgman coach Mike Miller’s office hangs the numbers 146 and 31 – his boys basketball team’s record at home dating back to the 1995-96 season.

His players take pride in those numbers, updating them within minutes of returning to locker room after the latest win. And that pride extends to the 100-plus students packed into the corner bleachers that rise over the top of the locker room and into the rafters.

Bridgman is a Class C school with only 320 students. But roughly half made up the “Orange Crush” cheering section that piled into “The Hive” on Friday and helped the Bees add another win to the board.

A first-time Battle of the Fans finalist, the Orange Crush has been building one of southwest Michigan’s top cheering sections for half a decade with one goal in mind – to make Bridgman’s recently-constructed gym – renovated in 2012 – an old-fashioned, scary place to travel if you’re an opposing basketball player.

“I grew up with sports, and if you watch a college game – for example, a Michigan State basketball game – or go to Breslin Center, people are terrified. That’s all you hear on TV, and if you go to a game, it’s crazy,” said Bridgman junior Cullen Peters, a member of the boys basketball team who leads the Orange Crush during the football season. “It’s something at the high school level that we wanted to have as well. We’re feared. People are scared to come here.”

Bridgman on Friday was the second stop on this year’s Battle of the Fans III tour. MHSAA staff and Student Advisory Council members will visit Frankfort on Monday, Traverse City West on Friday and then finish at Beaverton on Feb. 14. Public voting on the MHSAA’s Facebook, Twitter and Instagram sites will take place Feb. 18-20, with the Student Advisory Council taking that vote into consideration when selecting the champion.

The winner will be announced on Second Half on Feb. 21 and honored with a championship banner during the Boys Basketball Semifinals on March 21 at Michigan State University’s Breslin Center.

The Orange Crush would love to be there to support its teams – the boys are 8-4 and made the Semifinals in 2010 – although the BOTF competition certainly has stoked the section’s long-standing fire even as Bees fans take pride in being old school.

While certainly there’s a rough agenda going into games, section leaders admit there’s little pre-planning involved. The Crush just asks classmates to show up en masse and follow what unfolds.

Cheers are passed down from year to year, and the section works in concert with a sizable pep band that sits above and the cheerleaders on the adjacent end line.

“The student section shows up to support the Bees. That’s why we stick to tradition,” said junior Matt Starkey, who leads one of the section’s favorite passed-down cheers, “boom-chicka-boom.” “We like to focus on the game and what’s going on in the game.”

The Orange Crush’s initial rise pre-dates this current group of high schoolers, although it is because of tragic circumstances that athletic director John Norton can pinpoint when the section got rolling.

A 2010 senior, Jeff Demko, came to Norton to get his assistance in ramping up the student section’s efforts that basketball season. That included the purchase of Orange Crush T-shirts in advance of the Jan. 5 game.

On the way to the game that night, Demko and classmate Frankie Pipkins were in a car crash and died.

Although the current seniors were in eighth grade, the current leaders had ties to Demko and Pipkins and vividly remember that night. Demko’s Orange Crush shirt hangs to this day in Norton’s office. And his spark for the student section continued in close friend Adam Klug, who kept the Hive buzzing into the 2012-13 school year.

That fall, Bridgman students including current leaders Peters and sophomore Katie Hartzler attended the MHSAA Sportsmanship Summit in Kalamazoo, where a main focus was fan sportsmanship and the previous year’s inaugural Battle of the Fans.

“We had a lot of ideas already … but we ended up learning a lot,” Peters said. “It really helped us take it to the next level. The whole BOTF thing, it really motivated people from the freshman to the seniors. Sometime with a student section you’ll see seniors and juniors getting into it, and the freshman just messing around at the top. The competition aspect just invigorated everyone to pull out even more school spirit than they had and also sportsmanship, what lines to cross or not to cross.”

For example, they may yell “airball,” but they don’t continue past that first missed shot. Or, they’ll chant, “If you’re winning and you know it, clap your hands.” But they don’t follow that with anything about the opponent.

Seniors Jordan Alfredo and Hannah Malevitis were cheerleaders through this fall before deciding to leave the squad so they could spend their final high school winter in the middle of the cheering section’s front rows.  And, of course, there’s mascot Buzz, Peters’ freshman brother Logan, who pushes a lever into a fake “TNT” box after every 3-pointer to send Bees fans flying backward.

The section has invigorated the boys basketball team in particular.

Peters remembered running onto his floor for the second game of the season, and the teammate in front of him was so stoked he threw his warm-up lay-up over the backboard. “I’m like, ‘Dude, what’s going on?’ He was so jacked from the student section,” Peters said.

And the leaders can tell when it’s making a difference. Peters said the Bees were second in their area in points given up per game last season, a direct effect of the tough homecourt. Bridgman hosted Decatur on a Tuesday earlier this season and had its lowest Orange Crush turnout of the season – but his Decatur friends said after how it was the craziest atmosphere they’d ever played in.  

“When other student sections come to the Hive, we’re constantly trying to do something no matter what’s going on in the game. We’re always cheering,” Alfredo said. “Other student sections get pretty intimidated by that, and that’s pretty cool for us. We’re such a small school, that doesn’t happen very much.”

When Bridgman was named a BOTF finalist, Norton called the five leaders into his office and told them to “spread the word.” Between Twitter and old-fashioned yelling, that didn’t take long.

But even if Bridgman doesn’t win Battle of the Fans III, the Orange Crush is proud it will be showing some purple when highlights are shown during the Basketball Finals on the Breslin Center scoreboard – Bridgman students raised $6,000 for eating disorder treatment Friday in honor of one of coach Miller’s daughters, who received treatment for the disease at Selah House in Anderson, Ind.

Bridgman might be among the smaller BOTF finalists. But it’s impact remains mighty.

“We want to be old-fashioned. You come to Bridgman, you’re going to be scared,” Peters said. “The focus of the game for the student section, and the crowd in general is (to create) a crazy atmosphere and be loud as heck.”

Battle of the Fans III is sponsored in part by the United Dairy Industry of Michigan. 

PHOTOS: (Top) Bridgman’s “Orange Crush” put the “A” in YMCA on Friday during the boys basketball game against Niles Brandywine. (Below) Mascot Buzz (freshman Logan Peters) is always on hand to keep the Bees buzzing. (Photos courtesy of Michael VandeZande.)