xavier collantes

Imagine for one month every year in college you had an all-expenses paid trip including food, hotels, and a chartered flight with your closest friends to a handful of cities across the United States including Las Vegas, San Jose, Chicago, and Phoenix to name a few. For every city you stay, you'll have a meal stipend and plenty of time to tour the sights.

On top of that, you have free court-side seats to the most anticipated basketball games during the NCAA March Madness. In the Final Four, Row D seats alone costs $50,000 let alone seats court-side.

What does one have to do for all this? Show up with an instrument and be prepared to cheer and dance around.

For my entire time at Gonzaga University, I was an active leader in the Gonzaga Bulldog Band.

As time went on and built the trust and friendship of many of my fellow band members, I eventually became the "Fungineer" or "Fun Engineer", a non-official position in the Bulldog Band leadership who was in charge of leading cheers and morale boosting morale of the ~80 members in the band.

The role required certain traits (as I soon learned) to be successful: creativity and listening.

Creativity is a main tool of the Fungineer. Rallying a platoon of college students to cheer the same way or get every single band member to participate is a massive challenge is any endeavor. The little dances the band does or the sheer amount of noise it can generate depends on how much enthusiasm a person is inspired with to set the fire which burns throughout the crowd. Perhaps the arena is quiet or the opposing team is about to make a free-throw shot and the player is facing the band, that's the time for a cheer.

As in musicianship, listening is key to understanding how a person can contribute to a situation. "Where is the beat?", "whose solo is next?", "does this drum fill belong here?", same with playing music in a group or duet, a leader must be attuned to the temperature of the team and how the people in the team feel and reconciling the team's emotional temperature with desired feeling you want to convey or steer the group into.

Imagine the last home game in before the tournament, the whole arena is glum, Zags down 11-25 during senior night. Of course as part of that crowd, the band will share the feeling, but it's the job of the Fungineer to repel such forces of sorrow. But how do you do that with a full band at 80 members in a sold out game of 6,000 alumni, students, and local Spokanites? You're only 1% of the whole crowd after all. You are the Fungineer, you envision not what is but what could be; and you do this by being the spark in a tinderbox of 6,000 Gonzaga fans.

You stand up in front of the band and do one simple thing: you get on a seat facing the band and wait... Until every pair of eyes are locked at you curiously... Point at the edges of the band 20 rows up, making eye direct contact with every human in a band uniform... Take a deep breath and from the bottom of your lungs, you yell in a deep pitch. "HOOOOO!" And as you yell as deep as your body can take, motion your arms up and down. The band starts yelling back in a raucous rallying response... They starts jumping up and down... The band faces the crowd and transfers their war yell across the arena... You see the crowd of 6,000 stand up and the noise in the area reaches a fever pitch.

Congratulations, you are a Fungineer. Like the drovers of the old Wild American West, herding cattle across miles and reining strays; you are a wrangler of fervent college students directing the masses to exert their potential together.

During my senior year, the Gonzaga Bulldog Men's Basketball team made it to the NCAA Final Four for the first time, the local news station requested an interview which can be seen here: king5.com