Ellington

All living things have an origin story. The Dawg Pack isn’t living, per se, but it is made up of a collection of cognizant beings. Their hearts may be pumping, but there is no guarantee to how fast they are thumping — that’s dependent on the game at hand.

And just like all other living things, the Dawg Pack has its origin story. To know how the massive congregation of jumping, bouncing, and screaming college students came to be, the beginning is integral. Because without the early stages, there is no progression. Without progression, there is not a student section that affects a basketball game to such a degree that Washington head men’s basketball coach Lorenzo Romar calls it a game-changer.

That brings us to Alex Akita. Without Akita, the Dawg Pack would in all likelihood never be referred to as the sixth man. Never would it take on the endearing name of Romarville. Never would it grace the cover of ESPN the Magazine. Never would 10,000 fans deride USC coach Kevin O’Neill into a shade of red usually reserved for overripe tomatoes.

If O’Neill’s ghastly burgundy shade was instigated by the Dawg Pack, and Akita was cause for the Dawg Pack to spawn to its current state, what brought Akita to prompt the beginnings of such a thing? More importantly, who is Akita?

The Early Years

The first campout was for the Stanford game. It was against a Cardinal team ranked No. 1 in the country for a good portion of the year that was riding a 26-game winning streak when it arrived in Seattle. Akita, then a freshman, and the rest of the Dawg Pack were waiting with newfound coordination.

“That was really the first time anything like that ever got organized,” Akita said. “That whole night people were up making signs. People were going all out, people were going to Value Village and stuff and got the most obnoxious purple and gold stuff they could find, really obscene. Everyone was just trying to have fun with it. That first night was like a party — everyone was just having fun.”

And so the Dawg Pack started rolling in the right direction. It had come a long way from just the start of the season, when some students would sit, others stand. There was no coordination in the first part of the season, no chants — nothing really. It didn’t help that the team wasn’t very good, although as the year progressed the Huskies became a legitimate squad under Romar, who was in his second season at the helm.

“You didn’t buy tickets because it was the cool thing to do, you bought them because you really wanted to go watch basketball,” Akita quipped.

So yes, you could make the argument that the Dawg Pack got its kick start from an undefeated Stanford team. You could also say a turnaround from a 0-5 start in conference play in 2004 helped. Both are valid, as many other arguments surely are. But what the Dawg Pack is all about now, that started with Akita, a skipped class, a library, and well, you can’t leave out Steve Fisher.

By the time fall 2004 rolled around there was a core group of about 30 Dawg Pack members. United through basketball games, they had become friends, which of course meant they’d hang out and talk. Naturally, that talk turned to discussion of the Dawg Pack, and that became an agreement that chants and signs needed to be the norm.

“I thought if we knew stuff about them, then we could heckle them,” Akita said. “We could yell at them. We could have fun with that, and there were a lot of people I was hanging with that I thought were really funny. So if they had material that was really funny, they could have a lot of fun with it. It would be like a comedy show.”

And that brings us back to Fisher, the head coach of San Diego State. Akita happened to be skipping a class before the game, so he jumped on a library computer and started to do a bit of digging. That Facebook and MySpace were in their beginning stages helped Akita, as did the lax security settings those sites had at the time.

(To this day, Akita is impressed with the ability of today’s Dawg Pack members to bypass the security settings on social media and dig up dirt.)

Fisher was the head coach at Michigan during the Fab Five days, so the ensuing sanctions that hit the Wolverines were perfect ammo for the Dawg Pack to spew in the now San Diego State coach’s direction. Akita typed up the information he found, printed it out, and spread it at the game.

The first edition of the Dawg Pack Dirt was a success, for the most part. There were some fans that were a bit offended, but most thought it was funny. Thus, there was the need to establish ground rules early on.

“When we made fun of guys on other teams, we never made fun of things that were out of their control,” Akita said. “You can’t shout at some dude that he’s hideous. If he’s hideous, he’s hideous — there’s nothing he can do about that. But if a dude was wearing a goofy-ass headband, then we’d make fun of that.”

From there, the Dawg Pack ascended the ladder of rowdy college student sections rather rapidly. The crowning moment for Akita, the one that made him realize what exactly he had created, may very well have came in his final year. during the 2006–2007 season, when the Huskies had a giant nonconference game against LSU.

LSU was good, and Glen “Big Baby” Davis, its star forward, was the driving force behind the Tigers’ success. That offseason, Davis had subscribed to the South Beach Diet and dropped a significant amount of weight. So what did Akita and his pals do? They went around Seattle to fast food restaurants, gathering tray liners, crowns from Burger King, and even a cutout of the Burger King mascot.

True to form, Akita took the stunt one step farther and called a talk show on KJR radio to promote what the Dawg Pack was doing.

“A bunch of other fans started showing up at the game with all the same stuff we had. For the first time ever, not only did we organize it ourselves in the student section, but we spread it to all the other fans,” Akita said. “That was really cool, having like 10,000 people in there more or less on the same page about the team.”

Present day

Just like a college basketball player, a student can’t stay in school for too long. After the winter of 2007, Akita was finished as a Dawg-Pack member — the days of season ticket holders recognizing him on the street were done. It was time for a new era.

One season went by, then two, and the Dawg Pack was as rowdy as ever. But then it started to drop off — a little less energy, not as much noise. Senior Anthony Ghazel joined the Dawg Pack as a freshman for the 2008-2009 season. He was there for the peak, but he also has had a first-hand look into an apparent decline.

“We had a group of like 20 to 30 people who were showing up to every game super early, going nuts, and we were definitely game-changers — that’s just the truth,” Ghazel said of fall of 2008 to winter of 2010.

But he said it hasn’t been the same. Less people are lining up early, the middle section of the Dawg Pack is less full, and more students are disinterested in the action. So he reached out to someone he has been in contact with for over a year: Akita.

The two have emailed back and forth as the reins changed on who sent out the Dawg Pack Dirt, but this request was different. Ghazel asked Akita to call out the Dawg Pack on his popular website, seattlesportsnet.com.

“If you’re in the middle section and just standing there, why are you there?” Ghazel said. “I almost got to a point where it was like, ‘Should the UW make a more competitive system to get tickets? Kind of like Oregon has, or like Gonzaga, where they have to stand in line even to get a ticket?”

Ah, but they are. Senior John Chase, currently the de facto leader of the Dawg Pack, says there are a few ideas the core members of the student section have tossed around. One such idea is putting your credit card on file at the start of the season. A student would not be charged until they walk through the door. This would incentivize Dawg Pack members to arrive earlier, as no game is a given to be admitted to.

Another idea is to be able to buy game packages, which would help if students knew they were going to be gone on certain weekends.

These aren’t just ideas, either. Chase is involved with the Dawg Pack Advisory Committee. The goal is for the committee to have a mixture of representatives from different demographics on campus — elected officials, athletes, Dawg Pack members. There are about 15 members, and the committee meets quarterly, said Luke Lovell, assistant director of marketing for the UW athletic department.

These things can help, and improvements to the system will be made, but it ultimately comes down to the people.

“You can’t be afraid that people are going to laugh at you,” Chase said. “That’s the whole idea when you’re talking trash to the players or leading chants. The idea is to get in their head and make them laugh. You can’t take yourself so seriously that people aren’t going to laugh or they think you said something dumb.”

It’s the same words Akita uttered about being part of the Dawg Pack 10 years ago. It’s the same ones Chase and Ghazel say today. If you come back in another 10 years, they won’t change.

Reach Sports Editor Josh Liebeskind at sports@dailyuw.com or on Twitter @jlieb24.