The line between good and bad behavior
The Milford student section cheers during the fourth quarter of the Class I championship game.
Crowds at New Hampshire high school basketball games has grown of the last several years, and with it has grown the concern that everyone in attendance is on his or her best behavior.
What exactly that constitutes is up for debate in some cases, but John Doyle of Foster’s Daily Democrat does an excellent job of taking a closer look here.
In a time when college student sections are glorified for their passion and shenanigans, a lot of high school students see that and want to emulate it at their respective school’s basketball games. While that enthusiasm is certainly welcome, it has to be within reason, which then creates a problem.
Do you put a limit on what can be done or said by a fan, which is just another form of censorship? Or do the same freedoms allowed to college students not apply to high schoolers?
I’ll admit, I’m torn on this. While I dislike the idea of any kind of censorship, high school is a lot different from college in many ways. Most college crowds number in the thousands, and like Doyle says in his article, sometimes chants and cheers can go unnoticed. But in a high school crowd of a few hundred, it’s different.
Also at issue is the maturity and the psyche of the high school athlete. Is it really fair to heckle a 15 or 16 year old for missing a shot or making a mistake? No, it’s not.
After being out of the loop for a few years, I had the chance to see a lot more games this basketball season. In many cases, I was surprised by the turnouts. For example, a mid-January game between Milford and Bedford drew a crowd that had to be at least a thousand deep (and of course it was at Bedford).
Another regular season game, in early February when Bishop Guertin hosted Merrimack, had a capacity crowd before the end of the junior varsity game.
The crowd that surprised me the most had to be the one that followed Milford wherever it went, and not because of its size, but because of its good sportsmanship.
Four years ago, I never would have guessed that. When students first began attending games en masse, it created an atmosphere that often times got too intense. Several times during that first season, it felt like the Milford gym might explode with the intensity of the crowd, and on one occasion I witnessed, it almost did.
But give athletic director Marc Maurais and the school’s administration and the staff that attends the games a whole lot of credit. They’ve done a great job of sticking to a set of rules, and give the students credit, too, for adhering to it.
The crowds for all the teams involved in the Class I semifinals and the final were quite large. If that’s usual for the other three schools, I’m not sure. But I will say this, of the four of them, Milford’s was the loudest and the one that showed the best sportsmanship.
The students should take just as much pride in that as they do their desire to support their classmates.