Loud Crowd among USC women’s biggest fans

A lot has changed about the South Carolina women’s basketball program, but one thing has remained the same. The Loud Crowd — a group of season ticket-holding, hooting and hollering, women’s basketball aficionados — are the Gamecocks’ biggest fans.

Michele Doto, Lisa Cash and Marilyn McManus are among the group who started cheering the Gamecocks women when the wins — like the fans in the stands — were few and far between. And they are not just present, they are loud.

Nora Murray, Andy Whitney, Brenda Winter and Linda LaRosa were some of the other Loud Crowd members cheering the Gamecocks’ victory against Savannah State on Friday in the first round of the NCAA Women’s Tournament.

“We were pretty vocal, and because there weren’t many fans in the stands, we really stood out,” said Doto, who joined the group in 2002. Doto comes from “a loud Italian family” from the Philadelphia area and is one of the crew’s more boisterous members. But she is happy that now you cannot single out her voice from the crowd.

“These days, the entire arena is a loud crowd,” she said. At the Gamecocks’ game on Friday, the Loud Crowd was surrounded by thousands of other fans.

The Loud Crowd has been cheering on the Gamecocks for nearly two decades.

McManus, one of the group’s longest-standing participants, had T-shirts made to show the group’s support for the Gamecocks.

“We had to make the shirts, because you couldn’t buy women’s basketball paraphernalia then, they didn’t sell it,” Doto said.

Besides, they had a message for the other Gamecocks fans, who tended to be rather sedate.

“They thought they were at the ballet or something,” said Cash, one of the group’s original 10 members. “The first shirts we had, on the back said, ‘No, I will not be quiet. No, I will not sit down.’ ”

Back then, if you were watching a Gamecocks game on television, you were likely to hear the Loud Crowd do its “1-2-3 Wienie” referee taunt.

“When it started, it was a completely different kind of team,” Doto said. “Most of the girls on the team were from Europe, so they didn’t have a lot of family and, especially at away games, we just wanted them to know they had support.”

With the arrival of coach Dawn Staley, and the gradual metamorphosis of the team into a squad of hometown girls and native South Carolinians, the stands gradually filled and the arena came alive as the team began to be big winners.

The team’s most consistent supporters welcomed the company.

“Being at the university that we love, it’s been awesome to see the growth of the team and women’s basketball in general,” Cash said. That women’s basketball is no longer just a Title 9 requirement but one of the most successful programs in South Carolina’s athletic department, is a great joy to the Loud Crowd.

“It’s really been in the last year or two that the arena started to fill up. We’ve doubled from last year and it’s so nice to see and so well-deserved,” Doto said.

The group also has been a mainstay at the SEC tournaments over the years, and they were overjoyed to be able to watch their team celebrate the SEC championship earlier this month.

“They used to go and lose the first game and we’d have to choose another team to cheer for, so this year, it was exciting to be able to say, hey, my team’s still here,” Cash said.

“After 14 years of going to this tournament, I was in Little Rock to see just a fantastic group of young women and coaches cut down the nets.”

The Loud Crowd does not interact much with the team, but Doto and McManus know they make a difference.

“Sometimes, if it’s a little quiet or they’re close enough that they hear something we say, sometimes you’ll see one of the players look back and laugh or smile. They really appreciate the support,” Doto said.

TheGamecocks (31-2), a No. 1 seed in the Greensboro region, host Syracuse Sunday in the second round, and the Loud Crowd will be there, cheering louder than ever.

This story was originally published March 21, 2015 at 7:52 PM with the headline "Loud Crowd among USC women’s biggest fans."