Raucous Yale Crowd Pushes Bulldogs Past Crimson

NEW HAVEN, Conn—If Yale coach James Jones handed out a game ball after his team’s 82-74 victory over Harvard on Friday night in New Haven, it would likely have gone not to any single player—although there were several candidates among the hot-shooting Bulldogs—but to the raucous mass of 2,336 fans that packed John J. Lee Amphitheater.

In anticipation of the match up with the hated Crimson (10-6, 2-1 Ivy), which was televised nationally on the YES network, a vocal group of the sons of Eli filled the arena’s student section, which begins without buffer right on top of the far sideline. The Yale fans, many dressed in an assortment of sports jerseys, did their best throughout the night to make things miserable for Harvard’s players—and their best was more than good enough to make Friday an extremely uncomfortable experience for the Crimson.

“That atmosphere in our gym, I don’t know if there’s any better in college basketball, really,” Yale coach James Jones said. “Our student body just does a great job. I think they get in thefacebook[.com] and they figure out who [opposing players] are and what they do, and the whole nine. They do a great job of being part of the game, our sixth man.”

Yale’s students ensured the Bulldogs (10-8, 2-1) enjoyed a staggering home court advantage on Friday night by taking advantage of their home arena’s acoustics. As opposed to Lavietes Pavilion, which features an extremely high ceiling and expansive space behind the backboards and on the sidelines, the Lee Amphitheater is an older and more traditional gym, with a claustrophobic, sound-amplifying atmosphere enhanced by the proximity and steep angle of the wooden bleachers, which easily transform into potent noisemakers.

Standing throughout the whole game, the Yale students directed most of their animosity towards freshman guard Drew Housman. Housman received a harsh initiation to the Harvard-Yale rivalry, as Bulldogs fans chanted the guard’s name and mocked his shooting whenever he touched the ball. The point guard finished with nine points on 2-of-10 from the field and 4-of-7 from the line, to go along with four assists and three rebounds in a game-high 35 minutes.

“This is the first time we were really confronted with hard energy,” coach Frank Sullivan said. “I talked to Drew during the week—I said, ‘this is the first joint where everybody knows your name; they might be chanting it’—I was right on that call.”

Besides the taunting of Crimson players—which was continued by a smaller group of boisterous students after the game, who were kept at bay by police as Harvard filed onto the team bus—the sheer noise level in the arena undoubtedly became a factor, with the decibels growing as each of the nine three pointers Yale used to bury the Crimson passed through the net. The Bulldogs’ band, packed in behind the basket next to Harvard’s bench, was a key contributor to that sonic influence as well.

“I think one possession [Harvard] actually went out in the hallway because they couldn’t hear anything,” Jones said. “I went over and I thanked the band for coming, and hope they come every game, because we just had a great atmosphere.”

Harvard has played in front of larger crowds this season, such as the 7,000+ that witnessed the team’s loss to Boston College in Chestnut Hill, but had not yet experienced a crowd as loud as the one that hounded the Crimson on Friday. Lee Amphitheater is fast becoming a house of horrors for Harvard, with the latest setback the seventh straight in New Haven.

“I’ve been real impressed with what Yale’s done down here the last couple years,” Sullivan said. “I thought it was a terrific atmosphere—that’s what we’re in it for, to play in venues like this, with this kind of energy and excitement. We haven’t seen that this year, [in] any venue that we’ve been.”

Yale has fed off that energy to win 13 of its last 16 Ivy League home games, included an upset victory over league champion Penn last year, although certainly no match up elicits the emotion that pervades Lee for a battle between the oldest of the Ancient Eight. While Housman’s experienced the negative aspect of that emotion, Yale first year point guard Chris Andrews, who helped seal the victory by scoring 10 points on 10-of-12 shooting from the free throw line in the final seven minutes, was introduced to the power of his home crowd.

“I got the sense from even when we first came out at warm-ups, that tonight was going to be a big night,” Andrews said. “The crowd was really into it, and the rest of our team was just really excited about the game. I love this rivalry and I can’t wait until we go to Harvard and play.”

In Ivy League play, where parity exists in an extremely heightened form, having the type of crowd that was on hand Friday night provides a tangible advantage. Yale has shown that its supporters can help sway an outcome; what remains unproven is whether Harvard students, when Andrews and Co. arrive at Lavietes, can grant their team the same favor.

--Staff writer Caleb W. Peiffer can be reached at cpeiffer@fas.harvard.edu.