There are acrowd participation moments I’ve witnessed in the Coliseum that seem to stand out in my otherwise cluttered mind. Like when B.C.was here in 2005 for a game it’d win by 20. Jermaine Watsone, a classic B.C. bench guy who just gave opponents fits and drove the other team’s fans crazy, rolled an ankled under the basket. Time was called and help came to assist Watson, who was writhing in pain for a long time.
During the stoppage, someone in the student section yelled, “THREE SECONDS!”
That I liked.
How about in 2004 when Radford’s Whit Holcomb-Faye was taking it from the students and giving it right back. They’d drop A-bombs on him, then he’d score and offer up a “Sssh!” Fun stuff. At halftime, John Beilein grabbed a microphone and asked the students to be less profane. In the second half, they opted for the synonym that begins with the letter “B”.
“Technically,” Beilein said, “they did what I asked.”
There are a bunch of those and, in all honestly, a couple conflicting examples.
Like the Louisville game this past season when Rebecca Durst was announced as the new Mountaineer mascot. And people, in 2009, actually booed.
That I hated.
Those people never gave her a chance and, even worse, never gave themselves a chance to see why people are going to like Rebecca Durst.
In some ways, all the fuss about her gender is absurd. Her grandmother, who died when she was 12 years old, passed down a .243 rifle to her.
Talk about someone living the Mountaineer tradition.
“She went deer hunting, squirrel hunting, rabbit hunting,” Durst said. “I was too young to go with her before she died.”
But she was hooked on the life.
“I’ve gotten some rabbits,” she said. “I don’t have the patience to deer hunt.”
