Greetings from courtside at the Palestra, where warmups are underway for tonight's Penn-St. Joe's Big 5 Hall of Fame Game.
Those of you who attend St. Joe's games regularly, especially their games at the Palestra, know that their students usually arrive a good few hours before tipoff. I wanted to interview the very first student Hawks fans to arrive, so I got to the Palestra a few minutes after 4 p.m.
There weren't any around yet. I was stunned.
Finally, at 4:48 p.m., the first St. Joe's student fan, Matt Wilson (right), arrived. He helps organize the student section, distributing the red-and-white pom-poms that you see sitting on the bleachers before most of the students arrive.
"It’s a Big 5 tradition," he said of Hawks fans arriving early. "We love to come here and show up in big numbers and make sure we’re represented by our school. We have a lot of pride for our basketball team."
Wilson also wasn't afraid to talk a little trash about Penn fans, who are famous for not showing up in large numbers until right before tip-off -- if that.
"We take a lot of pride because the game’s on [their] campus and they can’t even show up before we do," he said. "We’re not far away, but at least we can show up early and help our team out before the game even starts."
A few minutes after that, three more St. Joe's students arrived. One of them, David (leftmost of the three at left -- he didn't want to give his last name), said that there's a very practical reason for getting to games so early.
"We need to because we know everyone else is coming behind us," he said. "It’s more out of necessity than anything else."
David added that he thinks the players feed off the energy the fans generate by getting to games early.
"It’s important for us because the players see that we’re here early and they see that we care, that we’re here to support them," he said. "If they see a whole section full of Penn fans and no St. Joe’s fans, they can’t feel good about that."
At 5:02 p.m., the first Penn student fans -- a group of three -- arrived. By that time, I counted 13 St. Joe's students who had come in by the main entrance (the one on the side of the tennis courts). Which wasn't nearly the kind of margin that I was expecting, and I've talked to a few other people here who were similarly surprised.
David Anderson (in the middle in the photo at right) chose to spoke for the first Penn arrivals. He called it a "very big deal" that he and his friends were arriving so early.
"We made sure we talked about when the first fans would be here," he said. "We talked about it with our friends and made sure that we were going to be here before they were."
Anderson is well aware of his fellow Penn fans' reputation for arriving late -- and the taunts that have often resulted from the St. Joe's fans in years past.
"We thought that it was important that Penn had a good crowd here first, because in the past, they’ve shown up like two minutes before tipoff," he said. "Last year was pretty embarrassing and we don’t want that to happen again."
With that mission accomplished, I headed inside, because I was getting pretty cold. In the lobby, I ran into the St. Joe's student who had all the rollouts, Dan McDevitt (at left with rollouts in hand). So of course I had to talk to him, and try to pry some information out of him on what the rollouts said.
"This year we really just kept with the traditional St. Joe’s ones that we usually do, and we played off the Fran Dunphy leaving for Temple aspect," he said.
But he admitted that not having Dunphy on the Penn bench would make this night rather unusual.
"It’s weird because I like Fran Dunphy," McDevitt said. "He’s a good guy, he’s a real nice guy. We did a rollout last year when he hit the [300] mark for wins. We were at the Temple game and it was weird to see him behind the Temple bench."
McDevitt was carrying five rollouts. I'll let you know what they say as the night, shall we say, unfolds.
