And the 2013 BOTF winner is ...
By
Geoff Kimmerly
MHSAA.com senior editor
February 22, 2013
Josh Money had gone to just about every Buchanan boys basketball game during his first three years of high school, usually one in a semi-full section of stands.
But as the senior “Trophy Buck” stood in front of his school’s newly-created “Herd” for its first theme night on Dec. 7, he hardly could believe his eyes.
He, his classmates and athletic director Fred Smith had hatched the idea of creating the section only a few months before. But as Money looked up to see – and hear – dozens of students dressed up for “Christmas on the Court” and waving “Buck Power” spirit towels, he began to believe winning this year’s MHSAA Battle of the Fans II was possible.
Late next month, they'll hang an MHSAA championship banner announcing the Herd as this year's BOTF champion and the best student cheering section in Michigan.
“Words can’t really explain it. It just feels good that we are the best. There’s no guessing. We are the best," Money said. "I’m proud of our school, proud of our community. How much support we had throughout has just been amazing. I never knew it was going to come out to be this big.”
The most wide-spread slogan of many put out by this year’s MHSAA Battle of the Fans II champion starts with the friendliest of greetings – “Welcome.”
But to see the entire Buchanan community – from elementary schools students to high school leaders to grandmas and grandpas locking arms and standing together – in our eyes, there was no more meaningful sign of the community-building power of the Herd.
Buchanan was chosen based on a vote by the MHSAA’s 16-member Student Advisory Council influenced by public vote on the MHSAA’s Facebook page. A total of 8,024 fans voted in the MHSAA Facebook poll, with those results then equated against a school’s enrollment.
Buchanan far and away received the most Facebook votes – 4,522, or 63 more than the size of the town’s population. Zeeland East received 2,056 votes. The Student Advisory Council based its vote on the following criteria: positive sportsmanship, student body participation, school spirit, originality of cheers, organization of the group, section leadership and overall fun.
Other numbers to consider from this season's contest: The 26 application videos have been watched more than 24,000 times, and the MHSAA-produced videos from our tour stops have 10,033 views. The stories on the five finalists plus Tuesday’s explanation of how to vote had been viewed 17,206 times as of 8:30 this morning.
As this contest comes to a close, we remember fondly each of our Battle of the Fans visits this winter. Any of the five schools would've been a worthy champion.
Here’s some of what we enjoyed most about each finalist:
Tradition Doesn’t Graduate Award: Frankenmuth
What we saw: More of what made Frankenmuth our inaugural BOTF champion in 2012. A large crowd reaching to the top of the bleachers, completely engaged in the game throughout, and having a blast from opening tip to final buzzer. And when it comes to halftime, no one is more creative – the “Silent Night” sing-along at center court was a solid follow-up to the 2012 halftime chicken dance.
Why we’re fans: Watching Frankenmuth from the outside makes the casual observer want to jump in and take part. The Eagles simply have a blast, regardless of who is standing at the front directing traffic. Nearly all of the section’s leaders graduated last spring, but roles (and in a few cases, costumes) were handed down, and a few key juniors already are involved – meaning we could see Frankenmuth among the finalists again in 2014.
All in the Family Award: Ann Arbor Gabriel Richard
What we saw: A true community where one might not expect to see it – a school which draws students from not just Ann Arbor but a handful of neighboring towns as well, yet gets constant support for multiple sports no matter what day of the week. This section has plenty of history, and some recent tragedies sadly showed again the strength of Gabriel Richard’s bonds.
Why we’re fans: A fun clip we didn't use in the video showed piles of props scattered next to the stands – the necessities of putting on an ultra-creative “Beach Night.” Our favorite was the human wave, which was then surfed by one of the section leaders. We were impressed by the big plans being made for the “Masquerade for Mott” fundraiser for the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, and just the overall connection throughout the section and with its basketball team on the floor, and cheerleaders and dance team on the sidelines.
One Voice, All Day Award: Zeeland East
What we saw: Members of “The Coop” don’t leave their responsibilities as student section members at the door. Living their brand of “rowdy” is a fulltime deal. Zeeland East was our largest school among this year’s finalists, but also has the most developed Facebook presence and a strong Twitter following to spread the word and keep the ideas flowing 24/7. And “High 5 Hallway” – a game day occurrence during which hundreds of Zeeland East students meet in one hallway during a break, form lines and high five each other – was our favorite new idea of this year’s tour.
Why we’re fans: From “High 5 Hallway” to the way senior leaders plant themselves with the underclassmen at the top of the section, the sense of unity was unmistakable despite the large size of the school and its section. Leaders have a constant dialogue with their athletic director – something we've found is a must for top sections – and it’s easy to get worn out just watching this non-stop Coop party.
Make a Difference Award: Vandercook Lake
What we saw: The lessons taught by Vandercook Lake’s group of 13 senior leaders are twofold: Make the most of your four years cheering on your classmates, and it’s possible to accomplish any number of goals by being driven and organized. The Jayhawks got this section going this fall in part to acquire a new mascot costume; they ended up with that costume, school flags, spirit towels and a legacy ready-made for the next group to pick up and continue building.
Why we’re fans: We have a lot of respect for a large group of students pulling together with so many possible viewpoints and abilities and turning out something this positive. Vandercook Lake also was our smallest finalist this year – but showed us a section much larger than its relative size and comparable in creativity and spirit with schools much larger. These students had an idea and made it happen.
Battle of the Fans champion: Buchanan
What we saw: All five of our finalists have created something of value in their respective schools and their communities as a whole. But nowhere is that presence felt quite like in Buchanan.
“The Herd” was little more than a group of milling “deer” a few months ago. Today, it’s a community staple, a point of camaraderie welcoming to all students not only at the high school but all the way down to the kindergarten classes. The section is invited weekly to community events, and the comments posted on our Facebook page and Second Half stories came from parents and grandparents, recent alums and those who graduated and left town long ago.
There’s a lot of pride in Buchanan, and Buchanan takes pride in the Herd.
Why we’re fans: Buchanan does this the right way. The “Woods” are lively, but positive. The Herd is creative and a little silly, but connected to the game and supportive of the team.
And someone give these students their honorary marketing degrees right now; by branding phrases like “Herd Dat!” with younger students, they've ensured this section will live on for years to come.
“Walking through the school, or in front of the stands, all the little kids are all about it,” Money said. “(They’ll say,) ‘Josh Money, you should do this. You should do that.’ I’m getting messages all day, every day from little kids telling me what we should do.
“To have something that great keep going for years, it’s going to be pretty cool to see.”
Now our finalists will take their acts to a bigger stage – clips from all five MHSAA tour stops will be shown on the main scoreboard during the Girls and Boys Basketball Finals in March at the Breslin Center.
All five sections are ambassadors of the best of student cheering sections in our state. We’re glad to congratulate them for setting awesome examples of the fun that can be had while keeping to good sportsmanship and a positive vibe.
And we’ll be proud to award Buchanan its championship banner – Herd Dat, loud and clear.
Click to check out our the stories and videos behind the finalists. Also, click to see student-produced videos from 26 sections who entered the contest. (Photo courtesy of Caryn DeFreez, DeFreez Photography.)
Heritage's Hawks Nest Wants You 'Hype'
February 5, 2019
By Geoff Kimmerly
Second Half editor
SAGINAW – Three years ago, Saginaw Heritage teacher Melissa Fila showed up at Bay City Central, tub of pompons in hand, ready to rev up her students who had made the trip to support the Hawks boys basketball team.
She found three huddled together and two more sitting with their parents. That was it.
How things have changed.
When Central visited Heritage this Jan. 18, the Hawks were filming a congratulations to the eight semifinalists joining them in the second round of this year’s MHSAA “Battle of the Fans VIII.” The stands behind Heritage’s home basket hold roughly 400, and they were packed.
From the humblest of beginnings, Heritage’s student section has grown into a Saginaw Valley League force and the first from that conference to make the BOTF finals. Thanks to a significant boost in “leadership” – much more on that below – the Hawks Nest has become the place to be for many of the school’s 1,500 students.
“This year I’ve seen a total change with people in the student section,” senior Khayli Bracey said. “Everyone is more confident than in past years. You don’t have to be like, ‘Everyone cheer.’ Everyone’s just doing it. Nobody’s necessarily telling people what to say, how to say it.
“Everyone’s just hype.”
We heard that buzzword more than a few times as we met with section leaders Bracey, fellow seniors Shelby Vondette and Josh Frank, juniors Abbey Coenis and Dom Simpson and sophomore Brendan Trier before Friday’s girls basketball game against Midland Dow to find out what’s made the Hawks Nest take flight this school year.
We’ll report on all three of our BOTF finalists visits this month following the format of a typical game night. We kick things off below with some of the Hawks Nest’s suggestions for other student sections hoping to grow, followed by the video from our visit and then more of a story behind Heritage’s rise.
Heritage’s Gameplan
Take some of these tips from the Hawk’s Nest:
Just get started. A gathering of just a few students to watch games can snowball into something more. Don’t be intimidated or afraid. Grab some friends, maybe pick out a theme to dress alike for a game, and see where it goes.
Team up with a teacher. Or an administrator, advisor, coach, etc. Working together with someone who can serve as a champion for your section to the rest of the faculty and administration is invaluable – as is having someone with whom to bounce around ideas.
Care, then don’t care. Care enough to be there, to cheer on your classmates, to make the effort to get more people involved. And then don’t care – what you look like when you’re dancing, how silly the chants might sound. Just join in and enjoy the ride.
Get everyone involved. Heritage’s leaders were adamant that the main difference in this year’s section is the enthusiastic contributions from underclassmen. We’ve learned this from many finalists over the years – the best student sections have plenty of seniors and juniors, but also welcome plenty of sophomores and freshmen.
Be unique. Be creative. It’s getting harder to come up with original cheers. Heritage has taken its share from others, including Iceland’s soccer national team supporters and the NFL’s latest ad campaign. But the Hawks Nest also benefitted from an early-fall leadership “day camp” where students were assigned to come up with new chants – and produced the section’s current favorite: “Ooh! Ah! We’re the Hawks of Saginaw!”
Pregame Prep
Heritage has offered a “Leadership Development” class for decades, and Fila has taught it for most of this one. Her students take part in some awesome projects – like for Veterans Day putting out 10,000 American flags on the school’s lawn to represent Saginaw soldiers, or directing coat and prom dress drives and an “Amazing Race” that most recently netted $15,000 in local donations.
Beginning with the 2016-17 school year, Fila’s Leadership classes also began working on ways to lead more students into the stands.
Heritage had good student sections in the past. The Hawks football team made the playoffs four out of five seasons during the mid-2000s, and students turned out to cheer. Vondette said hockey games have always been crazy – especially as the team has joined the state’s elite over the last few years. The girls basketball team has a long history of success, but she remembers students especially starting to show up during the Hawks’ run to the Class A Semifinals in 2015 when she was in eighth grade. “I feel like everybody got the idea that’s what a student section should be like when they went to a game like that,” Vondette said of that run.
Enter the Leadership class. In addition to all of the good stuff students continued to do in the community, Fila helped them begin to organize a student section – sparking ideas on persuading their classmates to give it a try, guiding code of conduct discussions to make sure students were cheering in a positive manner, and most of all empowering them to create something that would have an impact.
At first, the reborn section was made up of a group of sophomore and junior boys who liked sports. But it quickly grew. So did the Leadership class – last year Fila began teaching an “Intro to Leadership” for underclassmen, and that class allows them to get involved in the student section planning earlier.
There are 200 students taking a Leadership course each semester, and roughly 50 percent of the student body has taken one of them at least once. That means 50 percent at one time have had some hand in helping plan student section activities, putting together presentations on how to do cheers for the rest of the student body, or helping the Hawks Nest apply for Battle of the Fans the last three years (and make "Challenge" videos like the one below).
This fall’s MHSAA Sportsmanship Summit energized section leaders further. But what brought us to Heritage for this BOTF finals may have started during last season’s girls basketball run – the Hawks defeated East Lansing to win the Class A title in front of a sizable group of students at Calvin College’s Van Noord Arena.
“The girls winning the state championship. We took busses. There were so many kids there, and it was just such a good environment,” Simpson recalled.
“There was not one person quiet. Everyone was standing. Everyone was screaming,” Bracey added. “It’s the best I’d ever seen Heritage.”
“The energy was different,” Vondette agreed. “And now it’s just kept going strong.”
Game Time
The Hawks Nest filled with 250 students for our visit Friday for one of the most highly-anticipated girls basketball matchups of this regular season. Home games, as at any school, are the top draw, and Simpson said he’s seen fans going not just to basketball, hockey and football, but also soccer, volleyball and even once to a bowling match.
For this night, it’s important to keep in mind that those 250 attended while the boys basketball team was playing at Midland Dow and hockey team was taking on Birmingham Brother Rice in a high-powered matchup at the Michigan Interscholastic Hockey League Showcase in Trenton. And what’s more, Heritage didn’t have school Friday – giving fans a great reason to stay in for the night.
That wasn’t going to happen with Frank at the video controls.
He spends game nights with a camera in hand, and his skills have taken the Nest’s marketing up a level. Many games are previewed with a short Twitter video announcing the theme or other important information. Then he shoots at every game, building a library of hype videos to keep classmates engaged – and help him put together a strong BOTF application.
“We always said, the intention last year, since we didn’t go on (in BOTF), this year’s we wanted to make it a really jaw-dropping moment,” Frank said. “So right from the beginning of the school year, we were going to start filming and get everything.”
The theme Friday was “EXTREME” and that meant lots of lime green as students received a free T-shirt with student ID. The Nest also included a pep band, two pom teams and the school’s mascot – and plenty of noise, all positive, and despite a fast start by Dow as it went on to hand Heritage its first loss of this season.
“It was a blast. There was just so much energy,” Trier said. “We do it every night. If we’re winning, losing, we still cheer on our team no matter what.
“We’re just getting started. It’s about to take off. We’re going to go even higher. We’re going to shoot for crazy stuff.”
Postgame Analysis
We’re in this together: “I feel like our student section is a more comfortable environment for younger people now. I know a lot more of the underclassmen now through Leadership, and I feel like we’re all one now,” Simpson said. “Our school revolves around Leadership and the student section now. Everyone goes to the games. It’s a culture for us.”
Multi-media marketing works: “When Josh will post videos, and you see everyone in the student section just screaming their heads off, you want to be a part of that,” Vondette said. “That’s what you want to do.”
One memory can make it happen: “At the girls state finals, I was in the front with Shelby, and we were the ones who started stuff, and I just remember (thinking), ‘I want to keep doing this,’” Bracey said. “I would never be the one to want to start cheers – of course I’d cheer along with everyone else, but I was never one that would want to lead a whole group of people. But after that game and seeing everyone getting involved, I was like, ‘I want to keep doing that.’ That was the turning point for me.”
The Nest is the place to be: “Because we make it look so fun,” Coenis said, echoing Trier that the section will just keep getting bigger and better. “The more hype you are, the more hype everyone around you is going to get too. It’s just going to spread.”
Next stop on BOTF: We will visit Buchanan for its boys basketball game Friday against Parchment, and finish the 2019 BOTF tour at North Muskegon for its Feb. 12 boys basketball game against Montague.
The Battle of the Fans is sponsored in part by the United Dairy Industry of Michigan.
PHOTOS: (Top) Saginaw Heritage’s Hawks Nest anticipates a big moment during Friday’s game against Midland Dow. (Middle) Shirts and pompoms made for a green and blue “EXTREME” theme night.