Damage Control

The sideline of any sporting event is a fountainhead of school spirit, a pillar of community amongst students and families alike. At its center, an unofficial club incites and eggs on the cheerful chaos.

Crowd Control was informally created in 2007 to maintain good sportsmanship and a sense of community at sporting events. For many, Crowd Control’s continued devotion to South sporting is seen as a unifying bond within the student body.

“Sports unite people. I was a freshman when we won the State championship in basketball, and in that moment, there was no controversy. The school felt so much more united around one central thing: basketball,” senior Matt Cashman said. “Crowd Control is that school spirit. We organize students and get everyone to dress up and get hyped about the games.”

For others, the club’s presence does more than raise spirits, but a couple eyebrows too.

“Most years, [Crowd Control] are guys who act like they’ve been supportive of every single sports team, but in reality, it’s a couple of guys who have dropped out of their sports who only support football or basketball,” senior Erin Bunker said. “I think Crowd Control is selective over who can be in it and who can participate.”

During its years of operation, Crowd Control has never had a female student as a member. Students cannot apply for or freely join the club, which is described by athletic director John Johnson as “officially unofficial.” Each member is a senior and is chosen by the previous senior members of Crowd Control.

“The senior guys last year picked out the current senior members who went to, for the most part, as many games as they could,” Cashman said.

Although the presence of diversity amongst Crowd Control members has historically been lacking, Cashman does not believe there is any malicious reasoning behind it.

“We’re just looking for people we can trust to go to the games. I do think there’s some bias in the selection process… but I guess I don’t like to look at the political side of it. I just want people to have a good time at the games,” Cashman said.

Bunker attributes the lack of female members to a culture-wide view of women in sports.

“I think their reasoning is that since it’s male sports, males should run it,” Bunker said, “the same way that ESPN broadcasters are most often men. But now that we’re seeing women taking over in different fields, it’s obvious that women are just as capable taking charge of pep and school spirit. Unless there was a boy’s game right after, I’ve never seen Crowd Control at a girls basketball or girls soccer game. The only reason they pick male sports is because of the stereotype that girls sports don’t matter, like it’s a joke or there as a filler.”

The historical lack of attendance at girls’ sports is a phenomenon that Bunker says affects the morale of female athletes.

“For myself, [in games] I can use that as a catalyst, knowing that no one expects me to work as hard as a man or be faster, fitter or more competitive than a man. For a woman, being competitive has this connotation of being bossy or controlling, but for a man, it’s just in their nature,” Bunker said, “so if you tell girls that them being competitive is a joke, it almost brings down their mindset of going to the next level.”

This disparity in attendance between male and female dominated sports, athletic director John Johnson says, is undeniably reflected in ticket sales.

“I guarantee we would have a huge crowd, boys or girls, if they were undefeated or going for a State championship,” Johnson said. “If we had a girls basketball team running the table like our boys basketball team, my guess is we’d be packed. It’s not a matter of boys or girls sports. People have a tendency to follow winners.”

Senior Tegan Goodson says that seeing less attendance at girls’ games than boys is a disappointing fact of life for most female athletes.

“The volleyball team won first round of Substate, which hasn’t happened in a long time, and to see no one there at a Substate game… it hits you hard,” Goodson said. “There are people who have better records in girls’ sports than guys, so to hear that people don’t show up to our games because we’re ‘worse’ doesn’t really make sense to me in my eyes. It’s mostly just disappointing, because we want support too.”

Goodson believes that since Crowd Control is seen as the role models to students sitting on the sidelines, their presence at girls’ sporting events would set the tone for encouraging more students to attend girls’ games as a whole.

“I think it would make a difference to see Crowd Control maybe go all out for a girls basketball game or soccer game,” Goodson said. “I know it’d mean a lot to the female athletes and South as a whole to say, ‘Wow, Crowd Control is kind of stepping out of their boundaries and attending events that they normally wouldn’t do.’”

A Twitter account under the title Girls Crowd Control was created Dec. 5 to combat the issue of sexism in sports head-on. The response was swift.

“I understand that the girls want to have more of an opinion in the themes and stuff, but the creation of an extra Crowd Control is unnecessary. There’s already one Crowd Control. Why can’t we just share ideas?” senior Cooper Patterson said. “I honestly don’t know what the answer is.”

The negative response against the formation of Girls Crowd Control was not as severe as expected from members of Crowd Control, senior Ali Ballester said, but members of the group noted that most of the retaliation came from non-senior boys,  members of the student body who could not be members of Crowd Control, but defended the group vehemently.

“It’s more of the younger boys posing this threat against us,” Ballester said. “They will comment on every post we make with ‘this is gay’ or ‘delete this f’ing account.’ I think the reason behind that is maybe because of the fear that Crowd Control is going to change. They’re all pretty young. I think they look up to the older boys and think that their ways of doing things are right.”

Among these abrasive responses, female students like senior Leah Thomas were sent threats from unidentified accounts based on the perception that she, as well as other female students, may have had a hand in the creation of Girls Crowd Control.

“I was a little worried honestly. I could expect somebody to be frustrated or feel threatened, but I didn’t expect actual lash-out and internet harassment,” Thomas said. “It seemed like one of those accounts that would do anything for a follow, but there has to be some connection to South. Spam like that can’t be so direct. It could be a mask for someone to hide under, so they can tweet these threats and not have it traced to anyone at the school.”

The accounts that targeted Thomas and other members believed to be in Girls Crowd Control appear to have no clear connection to the girls mentioned or to Shawnee Mission South. These threats were made only under the assumption of membership, as an official list of Girls Crowd Control’s members had not yet been released to the student body as of the tweets’ publication date.

“The specific attack about my parent’s bank account was only sent to me. I was confused about why of all people, I was specifically targeted or just a few people. They didn’t target everyone in the group,” Thomas said. “It’s not like I stand out anymore than anyone else does. If anything, I blend more into the background.”

The tweets were promptly reported to Twitter, but were not found to have violated any of Twitter’s rules and guidelines, and therefore as of this publication, the tweets are still public.

“It just felt so odd that these random accounts were threatening us,” Thomas said. “This is about a school organization that wants people to go to sports games, and now all of a sudden because I support people going to female games, people are threatening to drain my parent’s bank account? It just doesn’t make sense.”

The toxicity surrounding Girls Crowd Control’s origin rattled the new group’s members, yet their plans to attend girls games were left undeterred, supporting the girls basketball team in their games against SM West Dec. 8 and St. Teresa’s Academy Dec. 10.

Despite public attacks against Girls Crowd Control, some female athletes like sophomore and girls basketball player Robyn MacDonald were grateful for the attention and support that the group brought to their games.

“We had people come for the whole game, not just for the guy’s game right after. It was really exciting to know that [Girls Crowd Control] wanted to come watch us and that we did have people cheering us on and messing with the opposing team, stuff that we don’t usually have at our games,” MacDonald said. “Crowd Control and Girls Crowd Control both have good intentions. This should be about supporting the Raiders, not an ongoing argument.”

Regardless of Girls Crowd Control’s perception and already infamous reputation, Thomas says this modern take on a tradition nearly approaching ten-years-old could be the catalyst to exhibiting a change in the way the student body views girls sports and sexism as a whole for generations to come.

“I think that this is an important thing for all schools to look at, not just about the problem of Crowd Control favoring male sports, but just in general, American society favoring male sports,” Thomas said. “The only way to break down that sort of gender barrier is to take little steps. Girls Crowd Control is one little step that we can take, and I can only hope that far in the future, maybe when my kids go to high school, then there will be a difference in the way that gender in sports is viewed.”