Other cheers I miss

Thursday night I traveled down to Bedford High to see Saline's girls' hoops team try and extend their winning streak, and, to a lesser extent, visit Bedford, the only Southeastern Conference school I'd never visited. I can't say I had the most pleasurable viewing experience, as Bedford's gym has been expanded at some point and the upper, additional rows are separated on a kind of balcony level over what was already a packed lower level by the time I got there. That wasn't a biggie ... but the huge support pole you had to look past if you were one of the unfortunate souls in the upper section? Yeah, I didn't care for that so much.

But the Bedford gym did have something going for it: namely, that their auxiliary gym floor was right behind the main gym, divided by a giant vinyl curtain, and that the Bedford cheer team was practicing there. The result was that although the fans could hear a squad of cheerleaders cheering on the Bedford athletes, you couldn't actually see them (except for a couple of quick glimpses of hands over the top of the curtain when they practiced their lifts or, I don't know, flew around). It was like watching a game in a gym haunted by cheerleader ghosts who had taken their Bedford pep and school spirit with them beyond the grave, or something.

All of which reminded me that this week's column had a brief cheerleading note and that I'd left several other cheers I enjoyed as a youth out for space reasons (and because they are, occasionally, cheered by Saline's and Milan's cheer squads). Anyway, here's a few of those chestnuts that would still get me on my feet (well, almost) today:

1. "Our team is DYNAMITE! Our team is DYNAMITE! Our team is tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-BOOM! DYNAMITE!" Any cheer that combines explosions and onomatopoeia (there's your useless poetry glossary term of the day, kiddos) is a good one.

2. "Be! Aggressive! Be, be! Aggressive! B-E-A-GG-RESSIVE!" Probably the single catchiest cheer ever created. Gets stuck in the head more easily than most commercial jingles, in my experience.

3. "L-E-T-S-G-O, that's the way we spell 'Let's Go!' Let's Go! Hey, hey, let's go!" The implication that other people might spell "let's go" in a different way but that this cheer squad, basketball team, fan section, etc. spells it L-E-T-S-G-O just amuses me.

I should probably take a moment to mention the cheer I have heard most often around here I really like, and that's the "We've got spirit, yes we do! We've got spirit, how 'bout YOU?" call-and-response, capped by competing "We've got more! We've got more!" chants at the end. We had the "We've got spirit ... " part back in the day, but the "We've got more!" face-off at the end must be a recent--and rather ingenious--invention.