Spectrum fans big part of game
While the entire Aggie Student Section is renowned throughout the western United States for making the Dee Glen Smith Spectrum one of the loudest, most intimidating home court advantages around, the elite group of students behind the basket closest to the visiting bench take it to another level.
In the tradition of Duke University’s Cameron Indoor Stadium Crazies, these fans take basketball games at least as seriously as the education they are ostensibly in college for. They show up at the Spectrum as early as 10:30 a.m. on game days. They research their opponents, looking for dirt and they prepare meticulously, all for the chance to provoke a reaction from a coach or player.
Skyler Frederickson, who considers major surgery the only legitimate reason to miss a basketball game, said, “Anything that gets the team or the coach to look at us and get their attention, that’s what we go for.”
Frederickson is an inaugural member of the SOW club, a select group of Aggie fans whose thirst for USU basketball is not satisfied by attending every home game.
“A few of my friends, we were coming back from the BYU game two years ago and we were excited about traveling and watching the Aggies win, so we decided to start a club and name it the Spectrum on Wheels,” Frederickson said.
Besides risking their grades by missing class to go on road trips, SOW members routinely find themselves in confrontations with drunken fans, as Frederickson relates in an entertaining anecdote from last year’s WAC tournament. The SOW club had just watched USU win its game and was still in the stands, watching New Mexico State play Nevada. That is when the name-calling started.
“Last year at the WAC tourney, it got a little heated with one of the Nevada fans,” Frederickson said. “This lady had been drinking too much and she kept turning around and making comments. I took a picture of her when she turned around to have a memory of her. She called us all assholes and one of my friends called her a lesbian, and she threw beer on us. They just drink too much in Nevada. This other guy grabbed my friend by the neck and wanted to beat him up.”
This year the SOW club has not been able to travel as extensively but still made it to Reno, Nev., and will be attending the WAC tournament in Las Cruces, N.M. Financial difficulties have limited the scope of SOW’s plans, and Frederickson said, “We really wanted to get a bus for roadtrips, but the insurance for that was pretty unrealistic, so that went out the door.”
All the time spent on the road and waiting around at the Spectrum on game day doesn’t bother Frederickson.
“For the televised games, people want to be on TV, so they get there early,” he said. “We are early regardless. We want people to recognize those are our seats and we pay for them with our time.”
Once the game starts, the SOW club thrives on coming up with inventive new distractions for the other team, and then topping themselves. Last year when New Mexico State came to the Spectrum, NMSU Head Coach Reggie Theus was presented with hundreds of photos of himself from his modeling days, stripped to the waist and oiled up.
“Last year some guys had the “Coaches Gone Wild” printouts and (Theus) was pretty cool about it and enjoyed it, so we had to do something for him again,” Frederickson said. “We decided to hold the Reggie Theus lookalike contest.”
Theus has proven himself to be a good sport, posing for pictures with the brown-painted Reggie lookalikes after the game. Frederickson said he wishes everyone would understand the SOW club’s good intentions the way Theus does.
“We just want to support Aggie basketball. Some people take us too seriously when we’re just doing it for fun. I like how Reggie Theus appreciated it. We asked him if we could stay at his house for the WAC tourney, and he went down the line and told us all to eff off. People that appreciate our joking spirit, we appreciate theirs,” Frederickson said.
This Thursday’s game against the Nevada Wolf Pack is one of the biggest games in the history of the Spectrum. The Pack comes in ranked ninth in the nation and boasts a roster stacked with names which have become infamous to USU fans: Ramon Sessions, Kyle Shiloh, Marcellus Kemp and of course, presumptive NBA draft pick Nick Fazekas. It will be a huge upset if the Ags win, and the SOW club has already been hard at work, trying to give USU any competitive advantage they can, up to and including annoying Nevada’s star center on the Internet.
“There’s a thing on Facebook.com where you can poke somebody,” Frederickson said. “My friend Josh Wood found Nick Fazekas on Facebook, so we set up a group on Facebook to poke Fazekas, so hopefully he will get like a thousand pokes from random people at Utah State. He will know we’re thinking about him.”
Frederickson urged all like-minded USU fans to join in the fun of taunting the future millionaire. The group is called Poke the Wolfpack, and Aggie fans can join up at www.facebook.com.
While the crazy fans with the neckties may seem like an exclusive club, Frederickson said nothing could be further from the truth.
“We accept anyone. The front row is pretty taken by the people who have been there for a few years, but a lot of us are graduating. It’s time to pass the front row on.”