Get rid of Cameron’s noise meter

At the start of the second half of Thursday’s basketball game against Virginia, a noise meter appeared on the scoreboard. It generated some half-hearted cheers from the crowd. Only four minutes later, however, UVA was forced to call a timeout during some real noise. It was that level of noise that gives you goose bumps and slightly disorients you, and it wasn’t in an attempt to break some fake noise meter. Our new video scoreboard in Cameron is great, and it’s been used to do some pretty cool things. I’ve also seen it used for cheap gimmicks, which has surprised me. Can you really say a Kiss Cam belongs in Cameron? It belongs at a baseball game right before the sausage race around the outfield. These activities are used to keep fans from getting bored between innings. Boredom is never a problem I’ve had at Cameron, but I understand that many enjoy diversions between play. I think it’s good that most of what we do during timeouts keeps the crowd flowing with the momentum of the game. I hope that we can all agree that using a video board to generate noise, however, is dangerous territory. Cameron is famous for its noise. We don’t need anything on an electronic screen to make it happen. We’ll let our friends at the Dean Dome play with the scoreboard noise meters, since they probably think they are actually making the meter go up.

Tommy Saunders, Trinity ’12