T-Shirt Throwing at Women's Matches
Chris Barnett
...
> What's the deal with this??... Is throwing wadded-up T-shirts to
>people in the audience universal practice at women's v-ball matches these
>days?? I've witnessed this phenomenon all over the country, from
>California to Nebraska!! I've also seen variations on the theme where
>mini-volleyballs are used instead of T-shirts...
>
> Question for all: who originated this practice? And why?... Did some
>PR consultant come up with this as a pre-game "concept," only to have a
>bunch of other schools copy it??
>
>
> Share your Wadded-up T-shirt Throwing Stories Here... Do you like this
>at introductions? Is this fun or stupid? Any r.s.v'er what to come
>forward to declare they've caught a T-shirt?
...
>
> -- Perry B.
>
>
>
Well, there's a variation of it here at UF. Nothing gets thrown out before the
game, I think the O'Dome might be a little too big for that, but after every
ace a shirt gets launched into the crowd. The cheerleaders have this cool
slingshot thing that can launch a shirt into the second deck in the O'Connell
center.
Best shot ever: When one of the shirts landed on top of the hanging lights, I
think it's still up there.
They've been doing the shirt thing at least as long as I've been here (4
years), I'm pretty sure they did it when I came to see some matches here my
senior year of high school too, so we're looking at 5 years. Coincidentally,
there hasn't been a t-shirt thrown at the section my friends and I sit in
during any of those 5 years, hmm I smell conspiracy. They recently borrowed
the idea from us at the University of Georgia too. Jim "I'm the biggest whiner
in volleyball" Iams complained about it last year when they got smoked here in
the O'Dome and then when UF went to Georgia, they did they same thing! I think
they also throw out shirts at Auburn as well, although it's not as cool as that
thing they do with the couch.
--
Chris Barnett
OPS Technical Assistant
Dept. o' Surgery, UF
---------------------------------------------------------------
POINT-FLORIDA!!!! HTTP://WWW.SURGERY.UFL.EDU/PEOPLE/CHRIS
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Eric Wang
>Share your Wadded-up T-shirt Throwing Stories Here... Do you like this
>at introductions? Is this fun or stupid?
I think it's fine. It's kind of like having door prizes at every
match. Anybody who catches one will have a treasured memento.
A variation we occasionally have here at Illinois is for a group of
students to come out between games with a huge surgical-tubing
catapult and a couple of volleyballs and fire them into whatever
part of the crowd makes the most noise. I've never tried to *catch*
any of these things, on the grounds that they're not Tachikara SV5Ws
:-), but I'll stand up and yell to increase the odds that the fans
within my vicinity get a fair shot. (I've had one ball deflect off
of the first group of fans and brush my hair, and recently another
ball flew past my shoulder within arm's reach. My greatest
temptation is to have one of these "free" balls sail right at me so
I could stand up and forearm-pass it towards a family with kids.)
>... the absolute best was by Tosha Comendant, former OH at California
>(1990-93). At one match, upon being introduced, instead of throwing
>her T-shirt, she calmly trotted off the court and, with a hush of the
>crowd, politely handed it to a guy in a wheelchair...
We've seen that a couple of times at Illinois. Players have handed
t-shirts to little kids in the front row, and once I recall a player
having to toss her freebie du jour (a plastic water bottle) a couple
of times to a young girl in the balcony before she finally caught
it and hung on.
My favorite ball-throwing moment was USSR-USA in the Kingdome in
Seattle around 1985, where we set the then-USA record attendance of
~ 14,500 fans in the first of a 4 or 5 match domestic tour. Craig
Buck sits alone at the very end of the USA bench, fiddling with his
shoes. Each Soviet player has a ball to throw into the stands, and
naturally they try to out-do each other by throwing their ball
further than the previous guy. Those 6'8 Soviet MBs are heaving
their balls 150' up into the cheap seats, drawing many oohs and
aahs. The very last Russian player takes a huge wind-up and
launches his ball higher than anybody else's, about 200' up, but he
muffs his release, and it has only slight netward and minute
crowdward motion. From his seat on the bench about 18 meters away
on the other side of the net, Buck watches the ball go up, up, up,
up as he ties his right shoe, picks up his left shoe, watches the
ball come down, down, down, down, and catches it with his right hand
while still seated and holding his other shoe in his left hand. The
crowd roars, Buck raises his hands over his head and triumphantly
brandishes shoe and ball, the rest of Team USA is ROFL (well, not
really, but Pat Powers is laughing so hard he can't stand up
straight), and the Russians start heckling and teasing the goat.
All levity aside, Buck is somewhat embarrassed to be stuck with the
ball. He ties his other shoe on, stands up and searches the
courtside crowd for a moment, then trots behind USA's baseline and
holds the ball out to a very young girl, who actually hides behind
her mother's skirt when she sees Buck coming towards her. It takes
her mother several seconds to coax her to come forward, and when she
finally does, she takes the ball firmly with both hands, which makes
the crowd go "Awww". Buck is bending over almost 90 degrees at the
waist, and the girl still has to reach *upwards* to take the ball,
which is larger than her head. The crowd (and the USSR team)
applauds, the up-ref smiles, and the Soviet trainers and managers
continue to humiliate the doofus on the bench. On the first play of
the match, Buck muffs a vanilla-1 about as bad as I've ever,
broad-jumping forward into the net so hard it throws him back out
before he lands. Coincidence? I think not :-)
BTW, USA won 3-0. Through two games, USSR's outside sets kept
falling 5' inside, and USA's block throttled their LHs. My uncle
Norman was an AA-level setter, and he kept yelling at the Russian
setters, "Push! Push! ai-ya" [a traditional non-obscene Chinese
curse denoting mild to moderate frustration]. Norman was hoping to
get his money's worth in a long 5-game match, but midway through
Game 3 he said that Russia was hopeless in this match, and that USA
might as well finish them off ASAP so he could get started on the
long drive home. I asked Norman if he could set better than that,
and he replied, "Eric, *you* could set better than that." :-)
Eric Wang
wa...@sml0.ge.uiuc.edu
L. Ravi Narasimhan
> Share your Wadded-up T-shirt Throwing Stories Here... Do you like this
>at introductions? Is this fun or stupid? Any r.s.v'er what to come
>forward to declare they've caught a T-shirt?
I think the prematch tshirt toss is a good idea. Harmless fun. I
don't recall the $tanfjord team doing that promotion in the late '80s.
When and where it started, I don't know.
The UCLA Men toss out mini volleyballs and I think the women did that
last season as well.
Joe and Josephine Bruin (Hey, I didn't come up with those silly-ass
names) also toss tshirts into the crowd after a UCLA block.
I caught a t-shirt at the UCLA-USC match a couple of weeks ago.
--- Oski
Golden glove
--
Ravi Narasimhan |
Department of Physics, UCLA | An observer who crosses the Cauchy horizon
Los Angeles, CA 90024 | emancipates himself from his past
os...@physics.ucla.edu | --- S. Chandrasekhar
Eric Wang
> My greatest temptation is to have one of these "free" balls sail right
> at me so I could stand up and forearm-pass it ...
Naturally, my greatest nightmare is that I'd get the chance but
shank the ball out of the stands. :-)
> On the first play of the match, Buck muffs a vanilla-1 about as bad as
> I've ever, broad-jumping forward into the net so hard it throws
> ^^^^ him back out before he lands.
Ever *seen*. As bad as I've ever *seen*. :-)
Eric Wang
wa...@sml0.ge.uiuc.edu
Jump into the net? Who, me? I've *never* done that. Honest. :-)
Rick Fletcher
: What's the deal with this??... Is throwing wadded-up T-shirts to
: days??
: Question for all: who originated this practice? And why?... Did some
: PR consultant come up with this as a pre-game "concept," only to have a
: bunch of other schools copy it??
: forward to declare they've caught a T-shirt?
My bet is that the makers of the V-balls suggested the idea. They've
been doing it at Washington State for five years. I caught 8 mini
v-balls at one match back in '91. All the players and both coaches. But
then, I was the only fan in the stands and a hard to miss target.
Brought on nightmares of 4th grade dodgeball. Now I can't get a seat
unless I show up 45 minutes early. I guess those mini v-balls really
bring out the crowds.
I caught a ball from Keren Oigman last year...she had signed it
"Keren Oigman, Israeli National Team". Now she signs her name and WSU on
the balls. Loyalty only lasts as far as the next winning team.
--
Rick
T. Rick Fletcher - http://www.chem.uidaho.edu/~fletcher/
Assistant professor of chemistry | That's Idaho, not Iowa. | These
University of Idaho | Upper Left Hand Corner. | opinions
Moscow, ID 83844-2343 | No, I don't grow potatoes. | are mine.
Drew E Kalapach
attend Rice's v-ball matches whenever I can and they have serving
contests like I've seen at WPVA matches. Serve into the hoops put on the
floor, win ya certificates for "Whataburger". "Serving for burgers" is
what I call it....
--
Drew Kalapach
"High Atop the Strand"
Galveston Island
http://pages.prodigy.com/TX/dekkal/dekpac.html
dr...@futurefone.com
Dek...@aol.com
Eric Wang
>What about the service contest between the second and third games? I
>attend Rice's v-ball matches whenever I can and they have serving
>contests like I've seen at WPVA matches. Serve into the hoops put on
>the floor, win ya certificates for "Whataburger".
Illinois puts on all kinds of contests. The least apologetic
display of overt financial sponsorship is the ever-popular "Dash for
Cash", which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. The court
is littered with about $100 in bills, mostly small denominations but
always with one $50 in the bunch, and two blindfolded contestants
crawl around and keep whatever they can pick up in 30 seconds with
the crowd screaming directions. There's a maximum age limit of ~10
years old, for obvious reasons :-) Once I sat right behind a family
whose daughter brought back about $90, including the $50, a $20, and
about 25 $1s, all wadded up into a pile about as large as a
grapefruit. She probably out-earned her parents for the day. More
recently, we've had pizza-eating competitions, where the contestant
who can eat the most pizza in one minute gets free pizzas for the
rest of the semester, and our MIVA 2 men's team sent out one of
their setters, who lost by a slice to some frat boy. (They should
have sent out an MB!) My favorite contest involved a raquetball and
five large, transparent vases about 2' tall and arranged in a
straight line extending away from the contestant, so you can just
drop the ball straight down into the first vase, but the fifth vase
is about equivalent to a half-court basketball shot in
distance-to-target-size ratio. You have to score 5 of 5 to win the
prize, which is actually nearly impossible :-), but youthful
contestant #1 knocked them down with his pinpoint-accurate
underhanded tosses.
Eric Wang Would pay money to watch the "Tenured
wa...@sml0.ge.uiuc.edu Professor" category of "Dash for Cash"
Rick Fletcher
: > My greatest temptation is to have one of these "free" balls sail right
: > at me so I could stand up and forearm-pass it ...
: Naturally, my greatest nightmare is that I'd get the chance but
: shank the ball out of the stands. :-)
Nightmare? I don't know, I'll bet Christine Garner (sp?) from Arizona
State sleeps just fine. She did it for the entire weekend, last.
Leslie Hilbert
About 5 years ago the U of Idaho decided to toss a candy bar called the
"Spud Bar" instead of a ball/shirt/thingamajig (the Spud Bar has existed
for years in the state, and I think they are heinous). Anyway, the first
match was a complete disaster...they threw them high and low, but very
few actually made it into the hands of the fans. There was even a
session on spud throwing at the next practice....At the next match a
player decided to hang onto just the wrapper and give a side arm sling
into the stands...imagine the crowd response when the chocolate covered,
log shaped Spud Bar ejected from its wrapper and skidded across the gym
floor looking very much like, well you get the picture.
Spud Bars are no longer a part of Vandal Volleyball, a move was made to
water-bottles stuffed with gift certificates.
Les