The Europeans have always had so much more fun at their soccer games, with their organized cheers and songs that unite a fan base passed down from one generation to the next.
As for football over on our side of the pond, take one trip to a Notre Dame home game and you’ll realize that Americans invented the art of putting on a football game.
It has become quite clear that us Canadians lag far, far behind.
My earliest memory of a hockey crowd was watching the folks in Montreal on Hockey Night in Canada. The men wore jackets and ties to the Canadiens game while the women also dressed as if they were attending the opera. The applause was polite, and few spoke during the play, other than to chide an official.
Through the years, the Canadiens have found their voice. But then there is the Canadian Tire Centre in Kanata, the building the Ottawa Senators call home. As a rabid Senators fan and once a member of the “Real Sens Army,” Patrick McSweeney found himself with the following options:
“I found I can stay at home with $2 beers — not $10 beers — not pay for tickets, and watch the Sens game in peace and quiet,” he said. “Or, I can go out to Kanata, pay for tickets, the $10 beers, and watch the game in peace and quiet.”
It’s a staid atmosphere out in Kanata, something that the Senators, and their new friends in the Red Scarf Union, hope to change.
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McSweeney is president of the RSU, the core of which emerged from the fan group known as the Real Sens Army, which inhabits section 319 in the upper deck. “We stand for the whole game. We’re beating our drums, we’re chanting all night,” said McSweeney, a 28-year-old account manager for Bell Canada. “It is a little more intense, and the goal celebrations are more intense. It’s a pretty crazy scene.
“Look to the English terraces — that’s where we got the idea from. But this is the first such idea in the NHL, and now other teams have expressed interest. We are picking up steam.”
Chris Atack, who works group sales inside the Sens ticket office, has been invited to speak at the National Hockey League’s upcoming business meetings in Toronto, to some very interested people from ticket departments across the league. Although the Senators may be the lone Canadian team in a position to sell an upper deck section at 50 percent off — that’s the deal the RSU gets — there are plenty of US-based teams that also have the kind of inventory to make this idea work.
“You may be on to something there, but we didn’t do it for that reason. We want to create this atmosphere,” Senators president Cyril Leeder told Sportsnet. “Some fans want to come to the game, sit there, and not be bothered. Other fans want to bang drums, make noise, stand and wave flags. When you mix those two together nobody is happy.”
Leeder’s people knew that their mission to get people to schlep out to Kanata would be made easier if the atmosphere awaiting them was more exciting. They toyed with inventing their own cheerleaders, but wisely decided that “an organic” group like the Red Scarf Union would be more real.
The RSU gets its own section, and they stock their group through Facebook and other social media. Folks who find themselves in the RSU’s midst are offered to stay and enjoy, or given tickets elsewhere if the whole atmosphere is too much. Beer, singing and standing are a big part of this, so either you’re in, or you’re out.
Leeder had been introduced to a similar group, located in the end zone of the Frölunda Indians, Daniel Alfredsson’s old Swedish Elite League team that hosted Ottawa in 2008. The concept had gnawed at him ever since.
“The model there is really cool,” Leeder said. “They have one whole end of the rink where they stand and cheer the whole game. At the end of the game, they picked Alfredsson, and chanted his name until he came back out of the dressing room and acknowledged them. Only then would they finally go home.”
A major goal of the RSU is that Senators fans never again get out-shouted by Leafs or Habs fans in their home rink, as has occurred before. One supposes that an organized, well-lubricated group of fanatical supporters was at the roots of hooliganism in English soccer, but the distance from here to there is still mammoth, with the Red Scarf Army still in its infancy. Even if one of the group’s tenets, listed on its Facebook page, is, “Always support our team — at the game, in the bar, on the bus or on the street.”
“We’ve only had two full-out games,” said Leeder, “and we’ve seen their enthusiasm spill out in (adjacent) sections.”
“We’re targeting the louder Sens fan,” said McSweeney. “To me, our target is the student of Ottawa, where we have three major campuses.”
It’s a win-win for fans and management. And I’d be surprised if its not coming to a rink near you very soon.
