PHOENIX — As she checks students into a pre-game tailgate where they will wait to be unleashed in waves into Grand Canyon University’s basketball arena, Jennifer Burke keeps asking the same question.

“Do you have the app?”

They all do. A visitor asks why the students need an app. “It controls your phone for the pregame light show,” says Burke, a sports management major from Colorado who also serves as the media coordinator for the Havocs, the student section that screams and dances its way through every game — win or lose.

The Antelopes are playing Illinois tonight. The Illini are here because they’re on the way to Tucson to play Arizona in two days. This stop at GCU is a favor to former Illini basketball and baseball player Jerry Colangelo, who grew up to become the godfather of pro sports in Phoenix. Colangelo’s name is on the business school at GCU. A statue of the former Suns owner stands in front of the quad-turned-holding pen where the Havocs munch on pizza and wait until 45 minutes before tip-off, when a gate will open every few minutes and a few hundred will go sprinting into the arena up the stairs and down into their seats until they’ve filled one side of the court and all the seats behind one basket that aren’t taken up by GCU’s sizable pep band.

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That’s when the music starts pumping and the Havocs start jamming and the Illinois players — who have been warming up in relative peace — begin to realize this won’t feel like a night at Penn State. Within minutes, all 3,500 students are waving their arms to the Vengaboys. They’ll scream until the Illini’s 83-71 victory is seconds away, but now, a few minutes before tipoff, they’re hopeful for a better result.

In the front row at midcourt, a senior from San Jose, Calif., named Caleb Duarte leads cheers between songs. Duarte, who hopes to become the next Jimmy Fallon, has dressed as Tinky Winky from the Teletubbies tonight. Asked to describe what will happen over the next two hours, Duarte turns into a Teletubby-shaped pro wrestler and cuts a promo.

“What you should expect is not going to happen,” he yells over the throbbing music. “What’s going to happen is something you can never expect. When we say we’re the biggest party in college basketball, we back it up. From the front row to the second row to the third row to the last row.”

He’s not wrong. Few in-game experiences compare to a GCU game.

Basketball games are awesome at Duke and Kansas and Kentucky and Indiana, where fandom has been baked in for decades and tradition guides the experience. But at many Power 5 schools — where they have the budget and the staff to make games more fun for the students and for the people to whom they’d like to sell more tickets — the games can be dull as dirt. And then the AD and the coach wonder why they can’t sell out the arena.

GCU, which played in the NAIA until the 1990s and didn’t become an active member of Division I until 2017, has proven that a school doesn’t need a perennial NCAA Tournament team to throw a hell of a party around a basketball game. So listen up, Power 5 athletic departments. If your basketball games are boring, it’s your fault. GCU created the ultimate hoops party from thin air, and if you take some notes, you probably could too.

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When Emily Stephens came to GCU in 2008 to run the cheer program, the former Boise State cheerleader had no idea she’d be part of a event-staging operation where undergrads would meet regularly with the university president to discuss how to make basketball games more fun. But that’s what GCU has done. Stephens admits that having a blank canvas — rather than decades of staid tradition and season-ticket holders in the same seats for generations — probably worked in the school’s favor. “We could kind of start from scratch,” Stephens says. “That’s one of the benefits we had that other schools don’t. They have to deal with that balance of tradition and new.”

But GCU created its own tradition in an unusual way. Instead of siloing marketing decisions in the marketing department and cheer decisions with the cheer coach and game management decisions with the external operations team, everyone got a voice, from university president Brian Mueller to the students attending the games. Mueller says the students themselves invented the Havocs. A group came to him during the Division II-to-Division I transition and asked to create a student section. So he empowered them to make one.

Now more than 100 people apply each year for 10 Havoc leader positions, and the two Havoc presidents are involved in nearly every major game management decision. Students help choose the music that plays before games and during timeouts. They design the gear that each member of the Havocs pays for as part of the membership fee. (Slots filled up in three minutes before this season.) They help design contests like the second-half crowd-surfing race during which students in each section pass a fan from the bottom row to the top row. The first fan to cross the finish line wins for his or her entire section.

Don’t Chase The Quick Buck

Mueller considers the basketball atmosphere a priority because it creates a deep connection between the students and the school. It doesn’t matter who the Lopes are playing. It doesn’t even matter if the Lopes are good. (We’ll have to wait until January when St. John’s transfer Mikey Dixon and TCU transfer Jaylen Fisher are both eligible and playing to know whether coach Dan Majerle’s team will have a chance to make noise in the WAC.)

Students pack their side of the arena every game because each game is the social event of the season. They know they’re going to sing. They know they’re going to dance. They know one of their fellow students might cause an opposing player to miss a free throw by waving a giant cardboard Michael Scott-in-a-bandana head behind the basket.

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That’s why Mueller made sure the students got prime seats. They fill one entire sideline, and they rarely sit. Why are Duke’s Cameron Crazies the most famous student section in college sports? Yes, they camp out so they can get in first and get the best seats. (So do the Havocs.) Yes, they make cheat sheets to more effectively heckle opponents. (The Havocs also do this, including social media handles for each opponent so fans can search for embarrassing info pregame.) Yes, they bob up and down and put the whammy on opposing players trying to inbound the ball on their sideline.

But the reason we know all this is because Duke was smart enough to keep giving them the best seats at Cameron Indoor Stadium. They are what the camera sees, and they are all the opponent sees. GCU did the same but allotted even more seats to students. Few schools do this because those seats could go for good money. But Duke and GCU and Florida — another school where students cover an entire sideline — have forsaken that potential revenue to create a home-court advantage that makes the game more difficult for opponents, looks cool on TV and makes the experience more enjoyable for the people who do buy the expensive seats on the other side of the arena. “It’s a tradeoff,” Mueller says. “You can sell those seats, but you can create an environment where there are all kinds of spinoffs from this.”

There also may be a long-term financial benefit. Recent graduates frequently apply for jobs at GCU because they want to remain connected to the campus. In the next few years, the school will need even more support from its alumni thanks to a recent change.

Prior to 2004, GCU was a private Christian school with about 900 students. It went for-profit at the end of the last decade, and on-campus enrollment swelled to 22,000 while online enrollment ballooned to 85,000. The school received approval from Arizona’s state higher-education regulatory board and the IRS in July 2018 to return to non-profit status. It currently is appealing a Department of Education ruling that the school can’t yet call itself a non-profit. But the school is going forward with the plan to be a non-profit. Mueller plans to start a grant-writing program to beef up research initiatives. A development office also is in the works. And in 10 to 20 years, who will be the people most likely to respond by writing checks when that development office calls? The ones who love their school more because they had a blast during their time there. “I think we’ll have a very loyal alumni base,” Mueller says.

Consider Every Detail

At a lot of schools, students are let into the arena to chase the best first-come, first-serve seating. Then they just sit for 90 minutes to two hours while the teams shoot around. There’s probably some hip-hop playing, but little is done to engage them.

At GCU, there is a reason the students can’t enter the building until 45 minutes prior to tipoff. “It’s very strategic,” Stephens says. Game organizers don’t want students twiddling their thumbs in the arena. They want them to enter the building ready to blow the roof off the place. And they do. The pregame energy level is off the charts from the moment the students start racing down the stairs.

To keep the Havocs happy and get them more excited for their grand entrance, their leaders devised a tailgate that begins three hours prior to tipoff. Stephens knows tailgating for basketball is unusual, but it works at GCU. “We don’t have football,” she says, “so why not?” And when the gate opens, the Havocs are ready to fly.

Don’t Be Afraid To Borrow Ideas

Indiana has the The Greatest Timeout In College Basketball. GCU’s cheer squad loved that idea and started its own flag run during a timeout. (Yet another thing that most schools do at their football games that GCU does for basketball.)

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Meanwhile, one of the most beloved of the concepts that GCU is trying to turn into tradition was borrowed from the Cameron Crazies. GCU played at Duke in November 2016, and Stephens and the two Havoc presidents at the time went to Durham for the game. They took a lot of notes. One moment that resonated was a timeout when the PA system played Cascada’s “Every Time We Touch”, a song that starts with a slow build before accelerating into a driving chorus. The next day, the group sat waiting for a flight at RDU. Every person scrolled through songs, looking for just the right combination of buildup and payoff.

Finally, one of the students played the perfect tune. It was a dance cover of Roxette’s 1988 classic “Listen To Your Heart” released in 2005 by Belgian group DHT. GCU started playing it at the under-12 minute timeout in the second half shortly after. The song has become a staple with its own choreography for the verse and an epic performance from mascot Thunder the Antelope during the breakdown.

None of these ideas are copyrighted. Any school in America can do it. So if you’ve got boring basketball games, start taking some of these ideas. Your students, your players and your fans will love you for it.

And maybe, just maybe, you’ll get a reaction like the one from Illinois fan Bill Shiner, who made the trip from Chicago to see his team play GCU and Arizona. “That,” Shiner said, “was the best student section in America.”

(Top photo: Andy Staples / The Athletic)