LAS VEGAS — From afar, they’re one of those mystical March Madness names that indicates some wee fairy tale with possibly a moat, not completely unlike “Wagner” or “Drake” or “Bucknell” or “Bradley” or “Valparaiso” or “McNeese State.” They’re “Grand Canyon,” which suggests the students wake mornings and stretch while gazing out over a 5-million-year-old hole, but in fact they’re in Phoenix, which in their defense is nearer to the Grand Canyon than is, for example, Mumbai.
Up close, wow.
To enter the purple realm of a Grand Canyon Antelopes game — sorry, Lopes, my bad — is to realize an energy still unfamiliar to many yet blossomed to infectious. It’s not just the ardent travelers for a Western Athletic Conference tournament or Coach Bryce Drew’s program about to make its third NCAA tournament appearance in the past four years. No, the student section alone counts as a triumph of creativity and choreography, not to mention noise.
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If you’ve never heard students from a Christian school and a dry campus, some of them shirtless, spend a timeout belting out every single lyric to DMX’s eternal 1999 classic “Party Up (Up In Here),” well, then, you should.
How many athletic directors end an interview as did Jamie Boggs of Grand Canyon?
“I’m glad you got to experience our Havocs,” she said.
They’re Havocs, officially, and any one of them, in everyday parlance, is said to be “a Havoc.” It’s perfectly normal and sprightly for one of them to tell you something along the lines of, “Oh, I’ve been a Havoc for so-and-so years now.” They’re the students bouncing and booming from one side of the 7,000-seat home arena or from three end zone sections of the conference tournament in Las Vegas. They’re proof of the earthly possibility of a beer-less madness, and they make ample use of the word “party” among their concepts, with MAKJ & Timmy Trumpet’s “Party Till We Die” among the habitual songs.
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They’re not only organized but damned-well organized. They have a president. They have a vice president. They have a director of teams (including dance, cheer, acrobatic, so on), a social media officer, another social media officer, a third social media officer, a game-day officer, another game-day officer, a third game-day officer, a marketing officer, another marketing officer, and a rookie leader, another rookie leader, a third rookie leader, a fourth rookie leader, a fifth rookie leader and a sixth rookie leader.
They’ve got an office, at least of sorts, as said President Luke Stoffel from Fort Wayne, Ind. “I’d call it more of a — it’s a place where we can kind of plan out for games,” he said. Their traditions — for a program that started Division I in 2013-14 — include eye-pleasing streamers and huge banners that get draped over themselves, and so, “We’ve got a lot of streamers in there, and we have big banners that we drop during games.” They were a smidgen late for a recent conference call interview, so they emailed to apologize kindly and say they were in a planning meeting.
That planning involved the campus watch party for the No. 12-seeded Lopes’ NCAA men’s tournament opener Friday against No. 5 seed St. Mary’s in Spokane, Wash., but the planning in general helps to harness and channel in-game energy that can do some pleasing things to the back of a neck.
“I was a cheerleader [from 2009 to 2013], and I got to cheer for the very first time in the arena [when it opened],” said Jesi Weeks, who has a full-time job coordinating all the various entitles that go into a game setting (including the band and the gregarious antelope mascot). She said, “When I was a student the Havocs were in their infancy and we had two front rows,” and now they have “3,000 students every home game. That sound has grown fiercely over the years.”
Sometimes, there’s flat-out spectacle, as when everybody looks calibrated on dance moves or bathing in streamers or in unison on raising arms during free throws. “The cheerleaders and dancers call the chants for us to do,” texted Hunter Jordan, a sophomore Havoc from Waxahachie, Tex., who was amid the Las Vegas din. “Then the Havoc leaders pick up on them and carry the chants throughout the student section! Mainly students can learn from those around them and just routinely going to games.”
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“It’s completely changed my college experience than it would have been anywhere else,” President Stoffel said. “Every other student is so involved and they love the spirit of being the Havocs.”
“I’ve always grown up [in Oregon] being a big college basketball fan,” Vice President Wilson Neitzel said, “but being a Havoc and being a student at GCU brings it to a whole different experience.”
“You watch a lot of conference tournaments,” said Drew, that central figure in Madness lore from his 1998 shot for Valparaiso, “and we’re in the maybe less than 1 percentile that would draw that many people to a conference tournament. And so it’s really cool that we have all that support and I know our guys really feed off of it and are thankful for it.”
He spoke from a Selection Sunday watch party in a ballroom at a hotel a few miles off the Vegas Strip, a gathering that featured band members and cheerleaders. He spoke as a coach who had felt emotional on Saturday during daytime but then proud on Saturday night, when his team showed the might and moxie to resist a charge from hot Texas Arlington for the conference title.
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These Lopes’ top six scorers are all transfers, from Southeast Missouri State, Presbyterian, Georgia State, Arizona State, Oregon and a Kansas/DePaul combo. That last one, Tyon Grant-Foster, the conference tournament MVP, would have to rank among the most fearless players you’ll run across, occasionally leaping with abandon as if he might soon dangle from a rafter.
“I just hoop,” Grant-Foster said.
He also said, “I played at KU, so it’s just, like, you see that [energy], and you see this [the Havocs], and it’s not really a big difference. It was something I was kind of used to. I didn’t know it was going to be this good. I wasn’t expecting that.”
As Boggs and Havoc leaders put it, it’s part of the mission to make Havocs and players seem as one, an idea never more helpful than in a transfer portal era. As a further wrinkle of that, the Havocs seem to skirt the tradition of fan grumbling. “When a player does make a mistake like all people do,” Vice President Neitzel said, “we are really there to have their backs and keep cheering them on for all the game.” So as they hop and yell and dance and sing and please the eye and the ear, it would seem that arena sounds can thunder without beer or grumbling.
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