By David Kaplan
Reporter
Roadrunner pride was represented at this year’s Western Athletic Conference Basketball Tournament in Las Vegas. The CSU Bakersfield student body student body was loud and proud in the stands for the men’s and women’s basketball games from March 11-March 14.
Last season was the first year that the Roadrunners were in the conference, and so it was the first year that they were invited to go to the WAC tournament. According to CSUB Spirit Coordinator Arthur Smith, last year the CSUB Spirit team took 43 students to the WAC tournament in 2014 in Las Vegas, and this year they took 53 students along for the trip.
As for the coming years, Smith says this annual spring trip should only grow. “I think that to set a goal for something such as this is only to limit yourself,” he said. “We will take as many passionate fans as we financially can, of course there is that component. But I think that we will want to take students that want to go, and what that number looks like we’ll determine in later meetings. However we don’t go into that with a goal. I think we’ll come out of that meeting with what a goal may be, but there is no cap.”
Hilda Nieblas, the campus programming coordinator and 2014 CSUB alumna, said the WAC tournament experience is very unique and full of enthusiasm.
“We really get to meet people from the competing schools as well, and it’s just a very different environment,” Nieblas said.
“It’s very energetic, it’s just really hard to explain because it’s like a huge rally with so many different schools, and you’re just pumped up in a very different way than you are here on campus.”
One of Nieblas’ favorite parts of the entire experience was the friendly spontaneous battles that broke out between schools.
“Some of the schools have like a drumline and they’ll kind of compete against each other, but it’s not like a real competition,” she said. “So, it’s like I play something, you play something and they just kind of battle it out. At one point we just had a huge group of people outside the auditorium or the gym actually dancing in the parking lot, which was pretty cool.”
In addition to supporting the school’s men’s and women’s basketball teams, Paulina Sylvester, the CSUB spirit squad captain, said that a draw to this trip is going to Las Vegas itself and at an inexpensive cost too.
“A lot of students haven’t even been to Vegas, so they use that as a chance to just go and just venture out into a new state and just figure out different types of stuff that they have there,” she said.
Sylvestor says students are asked to provide only $20 for expenses for CSUB, and to cover their food expenses. All of the bus, hotel and WAC Tournament ticket prices however are taken care of by the school.
The different types of extravagant foods in the hotels in Las Vegas are a thing that CSUB students love to try out. “We’ll just go into the Vegas Strip and just go out to different restaurants there”, Sylvester said.
The pre-game rallies really get Runner Nation involved.
“What we did was have a rally before every game and we had students bring out T-shirts, we had stickers, we had foam fingers, little “rally towels” that they would just spin around during the game.”
“The students loved it. It was really a great atmosphere,” Sylvester said.
Students got to watch two rounds of basketball for the men’s and women’s teams as the men lost in the second round to New Mexico State, 53-57 and the women ended their season in a loss to Texas-Pan American, 70-76.
Smith says you definitely won’t want to miss being a part of the experience when the Runners take it all the way.
“One of these days I see it in the very near future, we’re going to win a championship there and you’re going to want to be there for that. You’re going to want to share in that prideful moment of being a Runner, because we all are.”
