Loud & Rowdy: Rams fans get ready for Preseason NIT

As his team held on to a double-digit lead for most of the game, Virginia Union transfer student Jonathan Hargett blended in with the dozens of fans behind the Panthers’ bench in the Stuart C. Siegel Center.

Hargett’s story-an urban legend by now-buzzed around VCU’s campus for weeks, but the nomadic high school sharpshooter turned troublesome West Virginia castaway sat among more than 6,000 fans going almost unnoticed.

Almost.

There was that pack of Rowdy Rams fans to his right, decked in yellow T-shirts too bright to miss, each waving enlarged phony $100 bills. After all, if it wasn’t for Hargett taking money from an agent in high school, he would have never been bounced from West Virginia and he would have never ended up at Union for the Rowdy Rams to pick on.

It wouldn’t have been as bad a year ago when the Rowdy Rams were just a handful of die-hards-mostly members of the pep band-that went to almost every game on campus and even traveled for most of the games off campus.

Wil Yow, Chris Neal and Tony Gaines came up with the Rowdy Rams concept about three years ago. The three students organized things and called their first meeting, which drew all of three people.

But this year, some 60 people showed up at the University Student Commons in October for the Rowdy Rams’ first meeting, and both the men’s and women’s basketball teams made cameos.

By the time VCU played its first exhibition game against Union, the Rowdy Rams had shot up to nearly 100 members, according to Yow, the group’s president. Each member pays $15 dues and gets a Rowdy Rams “Sixth Man” T-shirt along with e-mail updates on VCU athletics and possible road trips flooding their inbox.

Yow said the biggest surprised this time around was the amount of financial support the group got from the Student Government Association. The group was given about $8,000 to fund the road trips it plans to take throughout the year.

“We were given a whole lot compared to other people, and that really tells me that they’re dedicated,” Yow said. “The support is definitely there as far as helping students get out to games.”

The Rowdies’ treasurer Amul Madan, who served on the SGA appropriations committee last year. Madan’s experience helped the group get an idea of “what they (the SGA) expected from a budget side, what we had to do to prepare for that. Now he’s on this side of things this year so he’ll really be able to help us with that now,” Yow said.

Men’s basketball head coach Jeff Capel stopped by the Commons for the first Rowdy Rams meeting to tell the students how important he thinks they are to the team’s success.

“I feel like they’re a part of our team,” he said. “We want them to come and be into the games. I think something like this really sends a good message.”

Capel’s squad opens its season Monday night at home against American in its first Preseason National Invitational Tournament game in school history.

The Rowdy Rams won’t have any dollar bills for Eagles stud Andre Ingram. Said Yow of the Highland Springs High School graduate who started all 31 games in his first season with American last year on his way to earning Patriot League freshman of the year honors: “He’s too clean.”