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WATCH - Red Cedar Rowdies: The loud and sassy support team for MSU soccer

Mathew Bluestein

The Izzone student section is famous for making a ruckus during basketball games, but the Red Cedar Rowdies do the same level of sonic fun for men’s and women’s soccer games. WKAR Current Sports Reporter Mathew Bluestein takes us inside the experience.

The student section of any college sporting event is the core of their support.There’s a lot that goes beyond just showing up on game days and leading chants.

The Red Cedar Rowdies, MSU soccer’s student section, spend hours behind the scenes getting ready for games.

I know, because I've led it for the past four years.

“The Red Cedar Rowdies are like the heartbeat of our support,” MSU women's head coach Jeff Hosler said. “They’re the group that energizes the entire stadium that brings people together. I think what's really unique and really cool about it is the mix of students and others all coming together for the common cause of celebrating our soccer programs and adding additional beliefs to what we're doing as a team.”

When I took charge of the soccer student section, I didn't realize what I was getting into. There’s much more to it than showing up, screaming and chanting every single game. I've been going to soccer matches for five years, been in the front row banging on a drum for 4 1/2 years, been involved in the behind-the-scenes efforts for four, and I've been the main leader for three.

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I don't want to take credit for everything. I had help. A lot of help. My freshman year, I had the privilege of having two mentors above me, and one for my sophomore year, and plenty of underclassmen for my last three years. I've never been in this completely alone, with the exception of the first few weeks of post-COVID, when I officially took over the student section by myself.
Leading a student section involves meeting with coaches, staff, marketing, and many more people to plan, execute, and budget. I've planned T-shirt giveaways, scarf giveaways, and created new projects. In the weeks leading up to the season, during the season, and even after the season, we are in constant contact with the school's marketing team to brainstorm ideas.

We don't always get the green light on all of our ideas, but we're always coming with new ones. I've been doing this for so long that I've already worked with three different assistant marketing directors, outlasting two of them, two student engagement directors, about 10 different interns, and so many more staff members.

Part of the challenge of being in charge of the student section is finding ways to energize the crowds. Sometimes it's a slow game, a low scoring one, or MSU team is losing. It's our job in those situations to find ways to keep the crowd involved, and give the team the added boost they need. The players have a job on the field, and we have a job in the stands.

Milwaukee_s First Goal.mp4

“I mean the energy is amazing,” said midfielder Justina Gaynor. “We always hear the cheers and the chants, you guys keep us energized for sure and every time we do something great, every time we do something bad you guys are always on the refs which always keeps us in the game and you guys are just awesome.”

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This year, for the Michigan State men’s soccer game, I organized the creation of what we in the soccer community call a tifo, essentially a large banner. But the thing was 15 feet by 15 feet, and the fabric we had was only eight feet wide.For this project, not only did we have to go out and buy supplies like the fabric itself, we had to then go out by glue, and glue two large pieces of fabric together to make one giant piece of fabric. In addition, we needed to go out and buy paint, paint brushes, mallets, paper towels, and so much more. What you see on gameday is a banner that was displayed for about 45 seconds. But what you don't see is the roughly seven hours of work that went into making that banner. More than two hours of tracing, painting, and cutting and gluing each. Something that won’t happen with any of the other student sections on campus.

The culture in soccer is different. While other sports might just buy painted banners, like MSU football, basketball, or hockey games, there's an unwritten rule in soccer that anyone who uses painted banners is taking the easy way out. I didn't want to go down that road, so we painted our own tifo. We also painted our own flag. A big, beautiful 8 by 6 foot flag. Another thing to keep in mind, almost everything we do is paid for by us. Marketing will cover the big things, like giveaways and smoke bombs, but our flags, cowbells, drum, props, streamers, and other projects are all paid out of our pocket. We didn't have time to make our flag until the last home game of the season. In fact, the flag only made an appearance at two matches. It made its debut in the NCAA first round game against Milwaukee, and made a cameo on the road in Notre Dame for the second round. The flag was another project that took about three to four hours to make.

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Another thing that takes hours to plan: road trips. I've traveled and helped plan trips to Ann Arbor, three different times, Columbus twice, and South Bend once. These aren't trips that are particularly easy to plan. Buses are expensive to rent, so we do all of our trips via carpool. We need to find drivers, and then people willing to go on the trip. Newsflash, not a lot of people want to go on an 8-hour road trip to Ohio on a Friday night or Sunday morning. This year we were able to grab seven people to go with us to a women's away match at Ohio State, because we had a chance to clinch our first ever Big 10 regular season championship.

We were so loud that afterwards, Lauren DeBeau said, “It felt like a home game out there.”

Traveling with the team makes a world of difference, which is why I feel it’s so important to plan them. These things don't go unnoticed by the players or coaches.

When me and about 15 others traveled down to Columbus for the Big 10 tournament final against Penn State, we divided into four cars that made the trip. After driving for almost four hours, we were 10 minutes away from the venue, when we had a flat tire. Stranded on the highway, one of us stayed with the car, and me and the other two members, had to hiked down the highway, went through some shrubs, thorns, and bushes, and then we had to hopped a 5- foot fence just to make it to a parking lot where we could call called an Uber to get to the game. We arrived about five minutes before the game started. Just in time! The one who stayed back wasn’t as lucky however, as he pulled up to the stadium with his new tire, five minutes after the game had ended.

Pre-game Banner.mp4

This year, I wanted to go bigger and better than we have ever gone before, bringing out all the stops, from the tifo and flag I mentioned, to getting scarf giveaways, T-shirt giveaways, having a live band perform, food trucks and so much more. Along the way, not only did the women's team break some records, we broke some records as well, smashing the previous attendance record three times. With that added attendance, brings a new energy that the players feed off of.

“I mean you guys [The Rowdies] especially tonight, you could feel the energy,” forward Lauren Debeau said. “You know, other teams don't like playing here because you guys bring that energy, we feed off of it, especially my favorite thing you guys do is when they throw in the ball and you got the bells in their ear, it's like having like a 12th man out there.”

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My freshman year, when I was still learning the ropes of being a section leader, we made it to the Elite 8 in the NCAA men’s tournament. Conveniently, both the senior and junior leader of our section were out of town for that game, so I, who had only lived in the state of Michigan for about 3 1/2 months, was put in charge of the entire student section. When we conceded the first goal, after bombarding James Madison’s left winger with insults all night long, they came back to taunt us. This resulted in multiple students flinging snowballs onto the field after the stadium wasn't cleaned from a snowstorm the previous week. About 37 minutes into the match the referee kicked out our entire student section. Nobody actually left, instead we all kind of just parted like Moses and the Red Sea and moved out of our section. As the night went on, we slowly migrated back in, and we were back to our normal section by the end. A game that we would go on to win 2-1 to go to the College Cup.

It’s moments like these that leave ever lasting memories for the students and the players.

“We definitely feel the love, we feel the support and we feel so much love from you guys, so we love it, we appreciate it and we couldn't do it without you,” said Gaynor.

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