Claire-ification: Gonzaga’s Kennel makes UCLA’s Den look tame

SPOKANE, Wash. – There are these red T-shirts popular among Gonzaga students that have the words “Official Sixth Man” stamped prominently across the back.

The first time I saw them was walking around campus with my sister during her freshman year in Spokane six years ago.

I didn’t get it.

I thought the first guy I saw wearing one was literally the sixth man on the men’s basketball team and just happened to be especially proud of himself. My sister had to explain to me that those shirts were in fact given to the entire student section, a group known as “The Kennel.”

These supporters are far more than a student section – they really do comprise the team’s sixth man. From the sidelines of the McCarthey Center to the Orleans Arena in Las Vegas – home to the WCC Championships – the Kennel provides Gonzaga with a distinct edge.

“They have routines, they do like stunt things, you know I was doing one of the routines one time. That crowd is great and it’s fun to play against – it’s fun to play with. We get just as hyped when they’re going crazy,” said senior/forward Tony Parker following Saturday’s win. “They were reading my tweets to me and everything. They do their homework – that’s a good crowd.”

I saw my sister many times on ESPN as she and her friends jumped up and down for the 40-minute game’s entirety – a physical feat I can only experience vicariously.

When I arrived at UCLA, I was ready for a similar experience. I knew the storied history of John Wooden and the long list of national championships hoisted by the Bruins. I knew that this was a sports school, full of competitive athletes.

When I arrived on campus, the one thing I found missing was the fan base. Even as an avid basketball follower, I stopped attending Bruin games, uncomfortable in the only ever partially-filled Pauley Pavilion.

Last year I sat down with Bill Walton to discuss his time under Wooden for a feature I was working on. He lamented that the days he knew playing in Pauley were gone – when every seat was filled with an attentive fan ready to see his team take the court.

I tried to camp out for UCLA’s 2014 matchup with then-No.1 Arizona – a game that came down to a nail-biting five-point spread – but too many restrictive rules deterred me and many others, rendering the pre-game event unsuccessful. Pauley was packed to the rafters that night, but I was relegated to cheering in the nosebleeds, miles away from my fellow students.

In contrast, hundreds of Gonzaga students were camped out overnight leading up to the UCLA game – braving 30-degree weather and reading textbooks by lamp light. Bruins can’t manage that kind of turnout in the perpetual 70-degree temperatures of Los Angeles.

Then again, the Kennel is incomparable in every sense. The McCarthey Center is considerably smaller than Pauley Pavilion. Gonzaga’s home court has a capacity of 6,000 compared to UCLA’s 12,829. The Kentucky game on Dec. 3 saw the Bruins’ largest crowd since 2012 with 12,202. Students arrived less than an hour beforehand and the student section was only filled minutes before the game began. The Kennel arrived in full force over an hour before tipoff on Saturday.

There’s an effortlessness to the Kennel’s performance. Every student seems to know what to do at every moment, no prompting needed. They all jump and chant and clap in perfect unison without an obvious leader. Over in Westwood, there’s an emcee forcing you into an 8-clap or a Bruin spell-out at every timeout.

“It’s an incredible atmosphere. The fans are terrific, the student body is not just energetic the whole game, but they’re creative,” said coach Steve Alford Saturday. “That’s the way student bodies should be.”

The Kennel reaches an enviable decibel level that had me completely stressed despite the fact I was not the target of the taunts.

“We couldn’t really hear each other to be honest with you,” said sophomore forward Jonah Bolden.

On the flip side of their fear-inducing function is the school pride infused into every syllable of every rally cry. The student section has you believing that you, too, are “GU”, even if you’ve never attended the school in your life.

While UCLA’s 28,000 undergrad enrollment may prevent the student body from having any singular interest, every Gonzaga student believes fervently in this basketball team.

Props to the Bruins for finding a way to translate that verbal abuse into fuel for their upset victory. Luckily for UCLA, its sixth man – Jonah Bolden – was on his game Saturday, because the Bruins have no honorary bench players to see them through to victory.