THE DEN: Women's Volleyball golDEN Game vs. U$C

My take:

1) we have too many colors. Unlike some schools, UCLA has three major colors that appear on our jerseys: true blue, yellow, and white (4 if you include the pink in UCLA women’s Vball and soccer jerseys during breast cancer awareness). From these colors come all the fan jerseys associated with them and the various shirt colors that are made with UCLA on them, ie. blue, yellow, white, gray, black, pink, or Hawaiian, there are too many combinations to match. On great sight, for example is Wisconsin or Penn state football. Wisconsin has red and white and their fans wear one or the other. Ultimately it can be assured that every fan has at least a red or white shirt and will wear it. Penn state is the same but with navy blue and white. I think in the game against Iowa, Penn state had a “white out” and it looked awesome. I think that we just have to many colors to wear on any given day and no one around campus really save their special shirt for game day (for students, a den shirt).

2) As mentioned in the article, we live in LA and there are many teams to cheer for. It sucks that people go to games not wearing Bruin gear, but thats life. There will always be Dodgers and Lakers shirts in the crowd.

3) At least from my perspective on students, they DON’T CARE. It is really disgusting, but as hard as we try to “make” people wear their den shirts, especially for basketball games (and we made a big push for that 2 years ago), we ultimately cannot stop a student going into the bottom section wearing other colors.

4) At least for basketball, our home jersey is white. People like to wear the home jersey. And I guess for football, people like to wear the away jersey. But this isn’t that big of an issue. Blue and White is manageable, just like the other schools mentioned above.

5) Marketing doesn’t EVER make a push at a “Color (pick a color and place it <—) Out.” I remember $C had a “black out” for basketball 2 years ago, and even though i dislike everything about that school, it was a great concept. It did look really bad when several people wore white though (ie. Pete Carroll and Matt Leinhart). So as far as the color they chose (although it had a meaning) it was a bad idea. I think we could pull a “Blue out” of some sort, like at basketball, but that would entail MASSIVE notices and a distribution of blue shirts to EVERYONE on gameday. It is definitely possible especially with corporate sponsorship.

I would love to see unity. It is awesome to see. Period. Before such tasks can be achieved, we have other areas to worry about. As a Den member going on my 4th year and seeing the crappy (for lack of a better word) turnout of students last year especially at basketball, I want to work toward LOUDNESS first and the color coordination second. Penn State, for example, doesn’t lack fan intensity. They will be loud on defense no matter what. They are arguably a one sport school. Therefore, they have time to focus attention on color coordination because they don’t have to worry about the prior. We need to work on fan loudness and intensity before we should even consider trying to match colors. I believe this will come with winning. For football, winning more than last year. For basketball, nothing short another title.