Breaking the Rule

Admission: I almost wrote a column that would’ve betrayed every sense of morality I have.

Allow me to explain; we here at Georgia College have the Thunder Crew, which is an upstart organization with the purpose of (according to their facebook page) “Making our home games as loud and aggravating for our visitors as possible.”

In short, their purpose is to rally our Bobcats to victory.

I was originally going to write a scathing column condemning the Thunder Crew for a couple of reasons. The first is they tailgate during women’s basketball games, and the second is their presence can really only be felt at men’s basketball games, not other sports.

Trust me, the language was harsh in the first draft. But then friend and advisor to the Thunder Crew Al Weston (also known as our awesome Sports Information Director) read my initial draft and encouraged me to talk to Pat Gamble, President of the Thunder Crew.

Yeah…I was going to write a fully-formed opinion without even having spoken to the very people I was about to condemn.

How short-sighted could I have been?

And it led me to a conclusion about sports fans: We jump to conclusions way too quickly. (And I just proved I’m equally as guilty as anyone else, only more so because it would have been published work.)

We deal with stats and figures every day; wins, losses, streaks, proof that a player is good or bad. And very often, we accept those and wonderful facts and then form opinions based off them.

Our largest problem is when the line blurs between solid fact and opinions regarded as fact. Often, it’s hard to tell the difference, and that’s when we tend to get in trouble.

Remember the whole Duke lacrosse scandal thing? The media practically crucified the alleged troublemakers.

And they were wrong. Why? Because they didn’t get all the facts from all sides first before forming an opinion.

Georgia College fans are a sorry bunch. I’ve been broadcasting our games for three years now, and unless Augusta State comes here to play us in men’s basketball, there isn’t a ton of noise, nor is there a bunch of support for our team. There might be over a thousand people there and I could whisper a conversation to the guy next to me no problem.

I still wish the Thunder Crew would support the women’s games more, especially when they’ve already played the current No. 1 and No. 3 ranked teams in the nation here, at home. There wasn’t much support, and it was sad to see.

But they’re doing everything they can. I have much more respect for what they do after reading the facts. Read the story and see how you can help improve it before forming an opinion like I was guilty of doing, will you?

Posted by Caleb Rule on Jan 27 2011. Filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.