Something important is missing from Vanderbilt Athletics.
By the time we reached gameday against Texas last semester, the Vanderbilt football team had long cultivated newfound excitement around its potential in the SEC. The student section was so stuffed that you had to step on toes to get to the bathroom.
All the markers of a united Commodore community were there. The students cramming the stands wore sports paraphernalia, and those not in jerseys wore our school colors. Black and gold pom-poms dotted FirstBank Stadium, and the student section would regularly turn into a sea of three-finger anchor-down salutes vaguely reminiscent of the Hunger Games.
While waiting for the game to begin, I was taught the hand symbol that stood against the Texas Longhorns — the downturned pinky and pointer finger. Though there was fun in alternating between it and the “Anchor Down” hand symbol that every Vanderbilt student is taught on their first day of orientation, the little downward horns slowly lost their glamor throughout the game. I wanted something more than a way to thumbs-down the other team — something more than a hand symbol to cheer for our own. In all the gold and black, the jerseys and pom-poms, we were missing something.
We were missing a rallying cry.
Being from Philadelphia, I know a good chant. Be it the “WE-ARE-PENN-STATE” echoing through Beaver Stadium or the Eagles fight song being sung as the eulogy of a funeral service downtown, these rallying cries do more than give fans something to scream other than obscenities during a game. They provide something to unite behind, and it works. If you venture out of your house on any given Sunday in Philly, the streets are filled with green jerseys and exchanges of, “Go birds!”. Even while wearing my Eagles jersey on campus after the Super Bowl, I got a number of exclamations of “Fly, Eagles, fly!”.
These chants don’t have to be reserved solely for American football. They are regularly found in and can be applied to a vast variety of sports. A different kind of football, the English Premier League, has an entire culture around game-day chants. While these chants can focus on tearing down a specific rival (see: “We Hate Tottenham”), they can also give space for playful banter between teams.
A Vanderbilt rallying cry doesn’t have to be a chant against another team. It doesn’t even have to be a chant. The Premier League is also known for the songs fans belt from the stands throughout games. Manchester City fans sing “Blue Moon,” Liverpool fans sing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and Tottenham fans sing “Oh When the Spurs Go Marching In.” Vanderbilt could similarly adopt a song to belt from the stands on game days.
Just look at all these Man City fans proudly holding up their blue scarves. This could be Vanderbilt one day! Hopefully not holding blue scarves, though.
When the University of Texas visited Vanderbilt once more for a men’s basketball game and I got to dust off my downturned horns, I heard many of the usual yells from the stands. Shouts of encouragement for our defense, taunts that opposing players sucked and cries that the referee’s calls were…hogwash. But they were all chants I had heard at Predators hockey games, too. They were nothing unique to Vanderbilt.
The closest we got to our own call was a half-hearted “Let’s go, Vandy” which would be chanted by no more than half the student section at a time. This “Let’s go, (school name)” is a chant you will hear at any rural high school football game across the country. Even the student next to me, who wholeheartedly participated in every other chant, refused to bring himself in on the commonplace chant. We need something of our own — something that is ours alone.
Allegedly, Vanderbilt has its own song. It’s called Dynamite, and no, it is not a parody of the Taio Cruz Song. The problem with this song is that it was written in 1938, and the introduction that Vanderbilt gives the song in its own article says that the first line is all that most students can remember. During every football game I attended last semester, I didn’t hear this song played once, and it was certainly not sung by students.
While Vanderbilt does have its “Anchor Down” hand symbol, there is something uniquely powerful in vocal calls. These calls can provide emotional release and an increased feeling of unity both at games and throughout Vanderbilt’s campus at large. In a study on the supporters of a Western Sydney football club, it was found that in the act of chanting together, fans leave their individual identities behind to join a united multicultural identity, creating a new culture with one another. If you have been to a sports game, you know that Vanderbilt students have already discovered this fact. Students are already shouting from the stands, we just need something to shout together.
Vanderbilt needs something of its own that students can rally behind. We need something vocal and loud, something we can yell at games outside of curses to referees or jeering at the opposing team. Surely, this Nashville-based school can figure out something catchy. We even have our own award-winning Blair School of Music. Hopefully, one day, some brave Vanderbilt community members will unite us behind a catchy battle cry.
