Drawing a crowd

Jamie Smith has helped attract students to UH basketball with the idea that ‘every game is a party'

By Brian McInnis

POSTED: 01:30 a.m. HST, Feb 22, 2013

~~<p>It had all the makings of a script for the next "Mission: Impossible" movie. The premise: Give the University of Hawaii men's basketball team something it's never really had — an honest-to-goodness, raucous student section.</p>
<p>The very idea of it seemed laughable. Stigmatized as a commuter campus, UH Manoa has ever struggled to build any sort of homegrown hoops tradition from its student base in Section F, the Stan Sheriff Center's designated student area behind the mauka-facing basket.</p>
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It had all the makings of a script for the next "Mission: Impossible" movie. The premise: Give the University of Hawaii men's basketball team something it's never really had — an honest-to-goodness, raucous student section.

The very idea of it seemed laughable. Stigmatized as a commuter campus, UH Manoa has ever struggled to build any sort of homegrown hoops tradition from its student base in Section F, the Stan Sheriff Center's designated student area behind the mauka-facing basket. Login for more...