It’s no secret that the two most important aspects of a home basketball game are the players on the floor and the fans in the seats. This season, Georgetown’s players have spoken for themselves, whether it’s Jessie Sapp hitting big buckets down the stretch against Syracuse or Roy Hibbert stepping back to put away the Huskies. And the fans have been spoken for by none other than head coach John Thompson III.
“They are a smart group of fans,” Thompson said after the UConn game. “They know when we are down and when we need it—that is when they really up the volume.”
With the team and the fans doing their jobs, it’s no surprise that the Hoyas are 10-0 at home. Any real criticism of the Hoyas’ home venue requires some real nitpicking—and here it is. The operations staff needs to move the cheerleaders’ routine to an earlier point in the game.
Unless I am mistaken, the Georgetown cheerleaders take the floor for their major routine at the first stoppage after the eight-minute mark in the second half (give or take a couple minutes). In two of the last three home games, this point has been a major juncture in the flow of the game—UConn took its first lead of the second half at the 8:30 mark. At these crucial points in the game, Coach Thompson would never look to the end of his bench to come through in the clutch, so why would operations distract from the home venue’s most clutch performer—the fans—in favor of a mediocre cheerleading squad?
I am in no way proposing that the cheerleaders be taken out of the game; I am only saying that their main routine should be moved to a less crucial time in the first half. Because the routine is only a few minutes long, this would require minimal adjustment to the gameday agenda. The cheerleaders could even be moved to before or after the “Deal or No Deal” ticket giveaway during the halftime intermission.
Along with all the benefits of a professional venue like the Verizon Center—better effects, greater capacity, cold beer—comes the inherent difficulty in maintaining an intimately hostile atmosphere along the lines of Duke University’s Cameron Indoor Stadium and University of Kansas’ Phog Allen Fieldhouse. It doesn’t help when, at one of the most crucial stoppages in each game, the fans are forced to cede control to a clunky cheerleading routine performed to the theme of EuroTrip. Let the fans take the lead in pumping their team up—they don’t need any help.
As I said before, I am nitpicking. But three of the last four conference games have shown that every possession and every stoppage down the stretch is pivotal. Besides, if the timing of a cheerleading routine is the only complaint I can come up with, we must be doing pretty well.
