LETTER: Respect the pep band, please

To the editor:

Congrats to the basketball team for winning that intense game against U of U! As an Aggie basketball fan, I was just as excited as anyone when our team won with that three point shot. Unfortunately, after the game was officially won, students started pouring out of the stands and onto the court. In my case, I experienced them running straight through the pep band! The director tried to stop them for a while, but soon saw there was nothing he could do to stop it. Many of us in the band were pretty unhappy about people coming that way, especially since it put a lot of our equipment in danger. After hopping up and down on the court for a while, people tried to cut back through the band, but we refused them for good reason. Walking after the game, I had the fortune to hear an Aggie fan in a car yell at me about how the pep band sucks. This for simply trying to protect our equipment, and in a lot of our cases this equals our livelihood.

The pep band plays faithfully at all the basketball games and tries to infuse as much spirit into the crowd as possible. We do this with very little benefit to ourselves and certainly don’t treat our fellow Aggie fans with disrespect. We even rushed our band members back and forth to try and still have a pep band Wednesday night, the night of a Jazz Band concert which was scheduled about eight months before the game was scheduled.

So to all of those who were so rude at the game, show a little respect. We don’t deserve the treatment you gave us. Be kind enough to walk around the band rather than through it, and certainly don’t tell the band members they suck. Remember… we aren’t on the other team.

Lydia Wheeler