Panther Pitt colors games blue and gold with towels

Thousands of football fans are waving towels throughout Heinz Field.

These towels are… Thousands of football fans are waving towels throughout Heinz Field.

These towels are blue and gold, not black and gold.

And they aren’t Terrible.

And this certainly isn’t the Steelers crowd.

Rather, this is how The Panther Pitt founders Robin Frank and Julie Brennan envision a typical home Panther game in the future.

Frank and Brennan are responsible for the creation of The Panther Pitt, a football spirit group similar to basketball’s Oakland Zoo. Rather than the yellow Zoo shirt the basketball fans sport, The Panther Pitt would like their icon to be a specially designed towel.

The newly recognized club gave away 10,000 blue and gold “The Panther Pitt” towels at the Notre Dame game and will give away 10,000 more towels at the Syracuse game.

Frank explained that The Panther Pitt would like to “pretty much do what the Zoo does, just get everyone in the stands, wearing T-shirts, standing up and cheering and supporting and bringing their towels to the game.”

The thought of creating a football spirit group came to Frank and Brennan two years ago while they watched the Panthers play the Fighting Irish at Notre Dame. The Notre Dame fans were wearing identical green shirts and cheering loudly.

Frank, Brennan and their friends wondered why Pitt didn’t have a similar spirit organization for football.

Scott Morley and Peter Stopp ran for Student Government Board on the platform of increasing community and traditions at Pitt, especially regarding athletics. Frank heard their campaign ideas and got them involved with the formation of the club.

“We just really pointed [Frank] in the direction of the right people,” said Stopp, who is now on the Board.

Frank contacted the athletics department, Team Pittsburgh and the Alumni Association to share her ideas about a football booster organization. According to Frank, the athletics department volunteered to give The Panther Pitt funding for T-shirts from Aeropostale. However, they realized the October weather may be too cold for T-shirts and switched to towels instead.

Franks admitted she was hesitant at first because “we don’t want people bringing their Terrible Towels and thinking we are the Steelers.”

However, the towels are being given away and are being sold in all places selling Pitt merchandise, according to Brennan.

“We don’t want the towels to be just something that people get at the game and say ‘Oh, look, I got a towel’ and then not bring them anymore,” she said. “We want them to bring them to every game.”

With the emergence of the Oakland Zoo for basketball, one may question why a football organization never existed previously.

Chris Ferris, athletics department administrator and The Panther Pitt adviser, said the idea for a booster club for the football team was not foreign to the department. The founders of the Panther Pitt stood out because they “had a great concept,” Ferris said.

Oakland Zoo founder Matt Cohen said the reason why the Oakland Zoo didn’t expand to football was because he and co-founder Zach Hale simply didn’t have the time.

“It’s something that doesn’t happen overnight, you can’t expect everybody just to follow along,” Cohen said.

Now seniors, Cohen and Hale started their Zoo campaign as freshmen and didn’t reap the benefits until last year.

“When we started, we didn’t get a whole lot of help from anybody,” Cohen said.

The Panther Pitt has support from the athletics department and already has a membership of approximately 50 students. Their goal is to get more members so they can become a long-lasting Pitt tradition.

“We intend do be an organization that kind of grows with the University and grows with the student body and sticks around for a long time,” Frank said.

For more information about The Panther Pitt, e-mail sorc+thepitt@pitt.edu.