Great post and something ive been thinking about for a while. It’s a combination of things really.
Firstly, You can’t compare the away atmosphere with home games as everyone is penned in together at away games compared to being spread out at home. I’ve asked some people their thoughts on having a dedicated section for drummers / singers and there isn’t a huge amount of interest in moving seats. I totally respect that. If you have a good seat in a middle block for example you may not want to move for a worse view (certainly the comments I’ve had from several people). Fair enough.
Having a dedicated section would make a huge difference though but would require people moving voluntarily or being moved by the club. That is bound to disrupt and annoy some fans and if there’s one thing we know Todd doesn’t like to to its that. Goes back to the farce of the seating list when we moved into the rink in the first place. It should have been an option then in hindsight. Not sure of the solution there.
Secondly, the building itself doesn’t help. I had a tour when it was being built by the previous rink manager and was told the roof was covered in a sound insulting covering. If true then that’s going to stop sound carrying well. I sit in block 19 and can rarely hear chanting starting off. When a good few people join in then we can hear it then and try and join in.
Thirdly, I don’t think our break in play music is up to much. Judging by people’s reactions around the rink it doesn’t seem to get much of a response. Maybe some different tunes might help?
Finally, our chants!!! The most insipid and uninspiring things I’ve ever heard. ‘Devils clap, clap, clap’ or ‘Let’s go Devils clap, clap, clap, clap, clap’. Complete lack of imagination. And the fact that we have had two superb players called Joey for over 4 years now and we can’t come up with a different song for each of them. Tragic.
I’m sure there are plenty of creative people in the fan base who could come up with some songs. Maybe we should create a thread for songs on here and see what takes off.