Criticizing the Redzone for their less than mediocre presence at girls basketball games, senior center, Madison Thornton, jokingly tweeted several pictures Monday afternoon comparing boys student sections to girls. The group responded that night to try and counteract the attention her tweet got.  

Friday, Feb. 7 both varsity girls and boys basketball teams faced county rival North Bullitt on the home court. As expected, the girls team won the game with a final score of 76-23. They also previously beat Bullitt Central earlier in the season 72-18. As the best girls basketball team in the county by far, they are also ranked sixth in the state. They have a current record of 17-6, and the junior varsity team has had 40 straight undefeated games.

Thornton tweeted the photos as part of a joke, because it’s a known fact that girls sports, or just any sport other than football or basketball, get less attendance. The tweet got a lot of attention, and even had anonymously made accounts replying back that “nobody cares.” The Redzone responded with their own separate tweet of a picture taken during halftime, the only time the entire Redzone stood up and was cheering, from when WLKY was filming footage for their segment. After the camera wasn’t turned on them anymore, the students sat back down, not getting involved with the game.

The tweet going along with the photo from the Redzone said, “Redzone Rowdies were hyped to be on WLKY at halftime of the girls game Friday!! #showout.” Thornton was not directly mentioned in the tweet, but a senior Redzone member decided to tag Thornton’s twitter handle in the thread, seemingly trying to say that her tweet was not valid anymore after this one. Tweeting out this picture in response to Thornton’s from the Redzone account is very misleading, and gives the impression that the student section was consistently the same for the boys and girls games Friday night. To say the least, it was not. I attended both games on Friday, as I was taking pictures and live tweeting for Livewire. I remember making a remark to another staffer at the beginning of the girls game about how the Redzone’s presence was sad, compared to what I knew it would be like for the boys. I was right.

In the pictures attached to this article, the difference in the Redzone when the boys are playing and when the girls are playing is very obvious. If anything, the Redzone should own up to not showing up and out for the girls team, because it’s not a secret. At this point, it’s pretty much accepted that the boys basketball and football team are going to attract the most students, which isn’t a newly known fact. Not only in our school, but everywhere, this is a consistently true statement. Even the North Bullitt student section Friday night during the girls game was not lively or involved. 

Certain sports getting less attention than others, like I have said, is nothing new. The girls soccer team has made history, being our first girls soccer team to win the District Tournament two years ago, and then moving on to take the District and Regional Champion title two years in a row after that, for the first time. The boys soccer team won the Regional Championship for the first time in school history this past season, and no student section was at DeSales. We have had two golfers go to state this year, our bowling team also recently went to state and our school has had countless other sports exceed this year. We have a ton of great athletes, who deserve their peers cheering them on no less and no more than the boys basketball or football team. 

The Redzone Rowdies have been trying to get the attention of Kentucky’s Best Student Sections Twitter, with hopes of becoming the best in the state, and have stepped up their game this year. But I will say, you can’t be the best student section unless you show up for all the students, not just your favorites.