Superfans

Mary Volmer, former basketball player and current English professor at Saint Mary's College, selected two Saint Mary boosters and me as examples of super women's basketball fans for an article in Women's Basketball, July/August, 2008 issue. I may be a bit prejudiced, but I think it is terrific!
The article appears as follows:

Superfan

by Mary Volmer

John and Linda Higgins and I sat in a cafe a mile from Saint Mary’s College. They both wore bright “Red Zone” T-shirts. Laminated women’s basketball booster badges dangled from their necks on red cords, while I in deference to our guest, Harriet Benson, a Stanford fan, a neutral red knit. None of us had met Harriet Benson. I’d read, and gushed about her book, Boosters Always Win, chronicling the experiences of Stanford Women’s Basketball boosters. I knew she was a retired chemist who came to the San Francisco Bay Area with a startup pharmaceutical company in the early seventies and her picture on Stanford’s Fast Break Fan Club page, on-line, showed a smiling white woman with light brown hair, well into her sixties. That she’d changed her flight from Seattle—where the Stanford women had whipped Washington the night before—still shocked me, given that my invitation, posted on impulse after I read her book, was less than inspiring:

Dear Dr. Benson,

I'd like to invite you to brunch and a game at Saint Mary's College with two of Saint Mary's Superfans on March 1st. What do you think?

She arrived wearing a “Fast Break Club” pullover to our “Red Zone” T-shirts and we stood like allied dignitaries on some business greater than basketball. Harriet is a small woman, a non-athlete, she called herself, but confident and self-possessed, exuding the authority of a professional woman who lives alone and does what she wants, when she wants. She and Linda could be cousins, similar in size, with conservative comfortable shoes, the same short-cropped hair, styled, but only just. Linda is quicker to laugh. For thirty-seven years she has been Jokester John’s best audience.

“John, Linda.” I said holding her book in front of me as if its cover were a talisman against what I feared might become an awkward silence. “Harriet Benson.”

I needn’t have worried. John has never been one to let a moment of awkward silence pass. “Nice to meet you Harriet,” he said, “Hungry?”

I met John and Linda ten years earlier when I was player. Over the four years I played for Saint Mary’s they remained little more than smiling faces in an ever-growing crowd; but they sat across from the bench, next to my dad who drove two hours, each way, for every home game. When I waved, all three waved back.

After graduation, and a year abroad, I returned to the Bay Area with no money to study a discipline that promised no money. When I met John and Linda again at a Saint Mary’s game they offered me their spare room where I lived, on and off, for the next three years. We went to breakfast with John’s stepfather, Brown. We went to games. Linda was still working then, and on days I didn’t teach, John and I talked baseball, antique cameras and billiards. They both met and approved of my future husband. On occasion, I still care for their cats. They are more than friends, much more than fans. Trying to understand their generosity seemed futile, writing about it self-serving, until I became aware that the stands of women’s basketball games are peppered with folks like the Higgins, who invest far more than the price of admission into the lives of the players they followed on the court. Harriet Benson for one.

Women’s college basketball’s most dependable fans hail from two demographics: First young girls and boys in youth league jerseys, sucking on Red Vines and Snickers, or sitting glumly next to overeager parents. Every year new legions flock to games armed with the same high-pitched screams. They know the names of the stars, clamor for autographs, crowd basketball summer camps. They grow up, or lose interest, or discover other passions, and a new legion replaces them.

And then there is a second set—aging professionals and retirees, either empty-nesters or childless, who buy season tickets and booster club memberships, who will travel to any state of the union to watch away games; they invite the team to dinner, listen to fuzzy internet broadcasts of games they can’t attend, and appear in the same seats with the same encouraging expressions year after year. They outlast coaches, and generations of players. They ask for nothing but a small part of a season’s drama. Their joy and their sorrow might be tempered by time and perspective, but they hurt for every loss, and revel in every win. Why do they come? They are rarely alumni. What brings them? Novelty?

“When I grew up,” John said, “women didn’t play.”

We sat at a round table, the undertone of conversations and smell of coffee invigorating. Harriet admired the tiny crepes arranged artfully on her plate.

“I didn’t play,” said Linda stirring cream into her coffee, a playful seditious look on her face. “It wasn’t encouraged.”

John and Linda attended their first women’s game in 1995, by accident. They had been living in the affluent suburban area east of Oakland since the ‘70s. John worked for Del Monte and Linda for the Chevron Corporation. Neither had attended a basketball game of any kind at Saint Mary’s until a friend of John’s from school called to say his son Dave was playing and did they want to come? “It was a double header,” John said, “The women played before the men and the game went late. It was a curiosity,” he admitted. “But when I got over the curiosity, I realized they were darn good.”

“Molly Flint was on that team,” said Linda.

“And Kelly Ashby,” said John.

“Dave’s wife,” said Linda nodding knowingly at Harriet, who had never met Dave, Molly or Kelly, but understood the sentiment. Even before Stanford’s national championship runs in the late 80’s and early 90’s, she too, marked time by players as much as by wins. Like the Higgins’ she’d donated her spare room when need arose. “Krista Rappahahn, lived with me,” she said. “And T’Nae Thiel.”

Having been one of Stanford’s screaming legion as a kid, I asked about a Jennifer Azzi, Kate Paye (now a coach for Stanford) Charmin Smith, Kate Starbird. What were they doing now? Do you ever hear from so-and so? We gabbed about Saint Mary’s showings in the NCAA tournament, Stanford’s efforts to regain national dominance and a little respect for the beleaguered West Caost. John bragged on Saint Mary’s freshman shot-blocker, Louella Tomlinson, and worried aloud about our chances against Gonzaga later that day. Harriet beamed at Candice Wiggins’ recent accolades, and JJ Hones’ 16 points against Washington. Overhearing the conversation, on the way to the till or the coffee bar, one might easily have assumed we were comparing notes on aunts, kids, grandkids, perhaps a favorite niece. Few would realize how we indulged ourselves, happy as members of a Star Trek convention who may have little in common, but on this occasion happen to be wearing the same plastic Vulcan ears.

Like Linda, Harriet never played basketball. Had competition been an option, she thinks she’d still have preferred study to an athlete’s repetitive routine, but admires, she says the dedication, and loves to watch. She became a Stanford fan in the late 80’s after her company had gained a measure of stability. “I had weekends,” she said. And she used them to witness Stanford’s steady progress to national fame under Tara VanDerveer.

“Before she was hired, the players asked Tara what her philosophy was,” said Harriet. “Tara answered, hard work.” Even without an athlete’s body, hard work was something Harriet knew about. No doubt Tara’s single-minded ethic, one of the coach’s most appealing and certainly her most intimidating virtue, reminded Harriet of the years she spent establishing her own career in an industry dominated by men. What Harriet did not expect is that she would become emotionally invested in the team—players and coaches. Somewhere between Tara’s arrival and the first national championship, Stanford Women’s Basketball ceased to be merely a diversion.

Harriet worked with fellow fans to establish Stanford women’s basketball boosters: The Fast Break Club. They elected officers, began organizing fund-raising events and travel to away games. John and Linda, meanwhile, are Saint Mary’s Women’s basketball’s first season-ticket holders and founding members of the Red Zone, Saint Mary’s infant booster club established last year by SueEllen Thomas, head coach Paul Thomas’ wife. “Booster clubs,” SueEllen told me at a home game, her large square hands tousling the head of one of the children crowding her lap, “they take a team to the next level.” At the time I wasn’t sure what she meant.

No booster club can endow players with ability, I thought out loud after brunch as I eased into the passenger seat of Harriet’s Mercedes, usually reserved for her dachshund. Athleticism and raw ability is seeded in our genes, has been for centuries.

Opportunity put air under the heels of female athletes, but booster clubs give active roles to fans with the time and cash to invest, and are, perhaps, much more responsible than they’ve been given credit, for the popularity of women’s basketball in the last two decades. Stanford’s Fast Break Club members harass sports editors blind to women’s sports, plug games with homemade fliers, maintain a Stanford Fast Break Club webpage with scores, stats, member blogs, and upcoming events. Before and after every home game, Kissick Auditorium (across from Maples Pavilion) fills to capacity. And as director of basketball operations, Eileen Roche, reads player stats, Fast Break Members shout and clap like a Baptist congregation; when Tara arrives to say a few words a reverent hush prevails. In the secular west the shared mission and the companionship offered by booster clubs must be a large part of the draw. Harriet’s assessment is more practical.

“Booster clubs recognize a need, and fill it,” she said turning down the cherry blossom corridor framing the Chapel of Saint Mary’s College. “When no newspapers carried the women’s scores, we simply called and complained.”

This year, the USA Today carried a four-page feature on the Woman’s NCAA Basketball tournament and ESPN has a contract for the broadcast rights through 2013. Today fashion glossies, with their wraithlike beauties, fight for space beside fitness magazines featuring able, muscled women. What’s more, the segregation of women, to women’s fitness, and men, to men’s sports magazines, is becoming usurped by female athletes, who by popular demand, are featured on ESPN the Magazine and Sports Illustrated covers. Not just blond tennis players either—and not just prim dark-haired racecar drivers—but tall, team-sport athletes, whippet quick and chiseled, or broad with large powerful behinds and wide shoulders, basketball players.

ESPN the Magazine’s 2003 feature on Diana Taurasi and the UConn huskies dressed the athletes not in slinky curve-enhancing dresses, but in black business casual, inadvertently, or perhaps purposely, drawing a comparison from the corporate glass ceiling Harriet overcame, to the equally smothering sports ceiling—a barrier which Title IX and resulting litigation in the 80’s managed to crack, but has only been shattered in the last two decades with the popularity of Mia Hamm and the U.S. World Cup Soccer Team, by the recent Olympic successes of the American national basketball teams, and by the surging popularity and visibility of women’s college basketball. If it was once in to be small and thin, it is also now cool to be tall, muscled and athletic.

Booster clubs, and superfans like Harriet, John and Linda, who badgered sports information directors and editors until the game scores were readily made available, helped propel their deserving teams into the national spotlight. They called and demanded. And not surprisingly as newspaper and media coverage increases, new fans find their way to games. Attendance numbers nation wide are climbing.

This year Tennessee women enjoyed an average crowd of 15, 796 fans at their home games. On February 7^th in Starkville, MS, 20,249 fans watched the Vols beat up on Mississippi State. They came to see the new talent and witness the passion and skill of 6’4” Candace Parker. They came to see Pat stalking the sidelines, scowl firmly fixed in place. And while the average number of fans drops precipitously once you leave the houses that Pat, Vivian and Geno built, the numbers are growing nation wide and have done for some time.

Erin Starck, of the University of Wisconsin, compiles attendance statistics sited above for the top attended Division 1 programs around the country. “We keep the numbers in part so people see they are going up,” she told me over the phone earlier this year. “It’s easy to think we’ve made no progress unless you watch the numbers go up year after year.”

And the numbers are impressive, especially when you consider most college sports, men’s and women’s, are poorly attended. Ever jump on a booster bus to see the gymnasts compete? Ever wave foam finger at a college tennis match? If you have, you’re in the minority.

It is a testament to the success of the program that even in the Bay Area, with its fair weather (basketball fans are foul-weather friends) and a plethora of ready entertainments, that Stanford draws nearly 4,000 fans a game. And when hosting national rivals, like Tennessee this past December in a preview of the national championship (Stanford won this game in overtime 73 to 69), it’s regularly a sell out.

“When I played at Maples against Stanford,” said Mary Hile-Nepfel, All-American player at USF in 1981 before a successful coaching stint, “they only pulled out the first two bleachers, and then we didn’t fill that.” Even the modest crowd of 766 at Saint Mary’s McKeon Pavilion for the game today is tremendous by comparison.

If, as ESPN the Magazine claimed in a recent edition, this is the age of the female athlete, then it is also the age of the women’s basketball fan and the woman’s booster club whose impact extends beyond an emotional investment with one or even a few individual players, to the success of a program past and future. A team with a booster club is a team with an active, dedicated fan base. It is team with a history of success, a team who expects future success, and has dedicated itself to producing a product worthy of its boosters’ support. The “next level” SueEllen Thomas’ booster club wishes to reach is not merely a marketing or fund-raising goal, but an effort to inspire and enhance the community in which the team plays, and to establish a tradition to which the screaming legions wish to become a part.

But fear not—women’s basketball superfans like John, Linda and Harriet, do not demand athletic success with the same Faustian fervor of many alumni and men’s sports boosters. Obsession is tempered by life experience. They want to win, but because so few are alumni, so few have children on the team (or children at all), their own pride is not punctured by a loss. The belt of narrowed perspective, which cinches players’, coaches’ and parents’ faces to migraine contortions before and during games, is two slots looser for the superfans. It is a comfortable, coincidental relationship. They are willing bask in reflective glory, but are removed enough not to get burned; they admire excellence, but failure is not quite as painful as it might be. They prefer not to battle drunk co-eds at men’s games, who are more intent on landing their painted bodies on television than on the game itself; they appreciate the accessibility of women’s players, who “don’t take fans for granted.”

And given the chance, superfans John, Linda and Harriet, are willing to care as much about a player off the court as on. And when, like today, their team slips down by 20 points in first half to the despised Gonzaga Bulldogs, they cheer the fact that in the end they only lost by 16.

“We won the second half,” Linda said wearily as we trudged with 60 other fans to the post-game dinner on campus. “Serena played well.”

Harriet wore a new “Red Zone” T-shirt. She greeted coach Jesse Clark who used to work at Stanford and Sherry Davis, the PA announcer, who she’d met years before. She yelled “rebound!” and “defense” and when the game ended took a moment, with the rest of us, to shake the sickening disappointment we felt for the players, the scowling coaches, the worried parents. With my impulsive invitation I suppose I had meant to thank Harriet and the Higgins’ and in doing so thank superfans nationwide for caring for “our girls,” and our games. Harriet changed a flight to attend, drove an hour across the Bay. I offered, in return, only brunch, a T-shirt and the valiant, but losing effort of a team she did not regularly follow. Still, as we walked back to her car, she seemed satisfied with the day.

Cherry blossoms speckled the pavement. Cork trees, green with new growth, shaded the path. With the proper perspective losses, like the end of sad movies, bring such beauties into relief. John and Linda say goodbye to Harriet, exchange numbers, and dinner invitations. We watch her drive away to rescue her dog from the sitter, enjoy what remains of the overcast Bay Area day.

The Saint Mary’s season ended soon after. John and Linda folded their Red Zone T-shirts, hung their badges in the closet—but Harriet’s work was not yet done. The NCAA tournament beckoned, and behind an inspired team effort, the record-breaking heroics of Candice Wiggins and the steady, seemingly stoic leadership of Tara, the Cardinal battled past Pittsburg, then Maryland to the Final Four.

From our respective couches John, Linda, and I—two superfans and one in training—were watching, hoping, cheering, for Harriet. We were watching when the Cardinal handed the UConn Huskies their second loss of the season, watching when Stanford finally fell to a battered but avenging and inspired Tennessee squad in the final. As the camera panned the faces of at turns euphoric and dejected players, our eyes strained to the crowd beyond, but saw only a jubilant sea of Tennessee Orange and a subdued block of Cardinal Red.
“How was Florida?” I asked Harriet later. Her answer carried only a hint of the weighty disappointment I expected. “Wonderful,” she said and as she reviewed the year’s successes, I was struck by her resolute and dogged optimism, which will greet the new season come November. It was, I realized the same species of optimism which John and Linda hung on the wall for safe keeping with their Saint Mary’s booster badges several weeks before. Coaches, commentators and players alike speak of team chemistry as elusive and unquantifiable, (perhaps spiritual) gift of winning teams. They speak of senior leadership, of role players, of young talent, of seasoned coaches and inspired newbies.

Now I don’t know for sure, but I propose that one rarely considered, but vital element of team chemistry comes not from within a program but from without, from superfans. Here’s my theory: Optimism, and its twin, Hope, are essential, bracing chemicals, which superfans, by their very presence, manufacture. It is, in part, this rarified injection of hope and optimism that lingers in silent gyms late at night, and bolsters the lungs of players through long, hot summer workouts, through the hellish purgatory of fall training, which greets each season anew in November, and remains through win and loss alike. It is this Hope and Optimism, which with a dozen other variables, will, for each team, breed success in its various forms: a shot at the West Coast Conference Championship for this team, another trip to the Final Four for that one.

Secret ingredients, not so silent weapons—superfans.