This gave the marketing team three weeks to get the message out and to make a push to the students. If that happened, there was no way they were trying it again, D’Elia said. The key was that the participation couldn’t be 20 percent or even 50 percent of the student body. So D’Elia decided they’d try to unite the student section, getting 20,000 people to wear white for the Oct. I don’t want to hear anything else about it.’” I complained, and finally (then-athletic director Tim) Curley said, ‘Shut up and fix it. “We could talk about the stadium and its size, but as far as the atmosphere and having people behind you, they were seeing something else when they went other places. It was not a place that wowed recruits - in fact, it had an opposite effect,” D’Elia said. “At that point, I was driving the brand for football and it was not great for us. The White Out that Penn State fans now love needed to be built one year at a time, starting in those three weeks after D’Elia stared at the student section in 2004. In fact, the White Out was born with D’Elia and a marketing team that first tried to create an all-white-wearing and hostile student section that came before social media made disseminating information easy and instantaneous. What’s grown to be the envy of many opponents and the hottest ticket of the season for the home team almost didn’t happen at all. The wall of sound didn’t happen overnight. “Coach Franklin doesn’t like me to tell this story, but I about passed out. “My first experience with it, I came out of that tunnel and felt pretty normal until we got out there on that sideline and just kind of soaked it in,” said Penn State defensive coordinator Brent Pry. It’s a chance to shape the future of the program, too, as impressionable recruits pack into the bleachers experiencing an atmosphere that has become a widely recognized spectacle. “You literally feel it.”įor those who’ve run onto the field, it’s a moment forever etched in their minds, win or lose. “I’ll have that eight seconds where I’m standing there in the tunnel and you see it and you hear it, but you literally feel it,” head coach James Franklin said. Now, even Penn State’s coaches have had to catch their breath as they stand in the tunnel, arm in arm with their players, and watch as the thousands of people wearing white and shaking white pom-poms let out screams that build to a roar, giving way to a rumble of sound that greets the home team as it runs onto the field and fireworks light up the night sky. In the early days, it was as much about behind-the-scenes planning, thinking and hoping as it was a town, students and fans buying into the notion that fans screaming, jumping and cheering in unison while looking like a sea of white could make Beaver Stadium a place opponents dread. 7 Penn State (6-0, 3-0 Big Ten) hosts No. Fifteen years after it started, the latest installment of the White Out arrives Saturday night when No. It’s evolved from the student section only to a full-Beaver Stadium tradition. What D’Elia pondered during an otherwise lost season in which the Nittany Lions went 4-7 laid the foundation for what’s grown and evolved into one of the greatest spectacles in college football, the White Out. “That was the theory, and it was really self-defense because we had to get something going.” “If you look around and see 20,000 people that are just like you, then you don’t stick out,” D’Elia said. Plus, most people own white T-shirts, right? It could be their uniform, kind of like an army that all dresses alike. So D’Elia wondered aloud what would happen if the student section wore the same color. In any crowd, there’s bound to be people who stand out who are yelling more than the person next to them, ones who in this case were decked out in Penn State gear from head to toe while their classmate next to them was less into it. We looked at the student section and said they’re just not having any fun and what is it?” It was a down-in-front crowd except for the student section, which would get rowdy every once in a while, but it was kind of random without really understanding the game or what their power could be. They were like opera crowds if you did something good. “At that point, the crowds aren’t what they are like now,” said D’Elia, who is now known as a game-day doctor of sorts, focusing on enhancing the game-day atmosphere and branding for college programs.
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