If you are a Cornell student with a pulse, it’s not too difficult to identify the influence and sheer devotion inspired by the men’s hockey team. But for many, the 40-hour marathon in the ticket line, memorizing a seemingly endless array of synchronized jeers, and sneakily stalking around the hockey house in Collegetown is simply not enough. For those who feel a sickening comedown sensation on the morning after a hockey game and battle feelings of purposelessness between home games, then the Red Line is for you.
The Red Line is a club created by avid Cornell hockey fans specifically for Cornell students. Members meet to organize and plan events with other fans outside of the familiar setting of Lynah Rink. According to the club’s website, curedline.com, “the Red Line will provide social opportunities and a public forum for fans of the hockey team” in addition to creating a link between fans, players, and Cornell athletic officials.
“Our goal is to allow students to have some kind of an outlet that allows them to get involved in a constructive way in order to support the team,” co-founder and vice president of the Red Line Justin Nachod said.
The student organization will not be affiliated with the Cornell Hockey Association (CHA), a group with similar purposes but comprised mainly of alumni rather than students.
“It’s hard to find the CHA,” Red Line president Adam Brown said. “They don’t have a visible web site and they don’t do a lot of recruiting on campus of students. But we want to change that. We encourage membership in the CHA, and we’d like to make them a more visible association at least through our organization so students will be able to donate time and money to the CHA in the future.”
The club has tossed around some ideas concerning the education of new fans, including distributing a booklet in the ticket line describing the cheers used during home games and even instituting a screening process for fans to be allowed to sit in the coveted section B.
“We want to make sure people have a good overall experience at (the games) by educating them about the history of Cornell hockey, how the cheers work, and the meaning behind them,” Nachod stated.
Other goals the club hopes to pursue are to consistently organize road trips to away games, including the ECAC championships, and to revolutionize the entire ticket line process itself.
“(Cornell Administrators) always say that they are going to try and improve the ticket line process, but they don’t really seem to do anything with it. It’s the same shenanigans every year. We want to get a large group of students together and come up with one, coherent idea to argue on how it should be done,” Nachod said.
In an effort to insure more consistent fan attendance, the club also feels that the ticket office should offer more single and multi-game options, rather than the all-or-nothing season tickets sale.
This is one group that will not be lounging around in the off-season, either. Members of the Red Line fully plan to keep hockey fans updated throughout the academic year and summer using the website, with updates on players, new recruits, and general rumblings from Lynah to whet the appetites of students yearning for Cornell hockey news year-round.
“As interest in the hockey team rises and falls with its success, we think that something like this organization will help keep the fan base solid,” Brown said. “So there won’t be years when there are 2000 kids showing up and the next year only a few hundred.”
stril, members of the Red Line insist that at the end of the game, this is still like any other club on campus.
“People join a club because they want to make friends and they want to feel involved,” Nachod stated. “So many alumni have already told us that (they) wished this club existed when they were in school.”
Archived article by Kyle Sheahen