It’s 7:15 pm at Creek’s South gym. You’re starting warm-ups, with loud rap music blaring in your ears. The game is about to start, and you look at the packed student section. This is the dream for any women’s sports team at Creek. A dream, that’s more of a fantasy.

It is no secret that Creek’s athletics are insane and that both women’s and men’s sports excel consistently. But it goes beyond just the player’s excellence; it extends to the student section. If you ask any boy player at Creek if they expect people to come to their games, the answer would be yes. The same could not be said for their girl counterparts.

“It’s just like fluffy misogyny. You know, it’s just an excuse for [not going],” senior Louden James Masters said. Masters is the Captain of the Varsity Women’s Soccer Team. “We are so good. Last year, we made it to the semi-finals.”

If it comes down to talent and hard work, womens’ sports teams, especially at Creek, are not underperforming. In agreement with this sentiment is the Head Coach of Creek Women’s Basketball, Clint Evans. “I think if you really like basketball, there’s a lot more execution in a girl’s game than there is in a guy’s game,” Evans said. In addition to this lackluster argument presented by sports fans, the school itself underperforms in its support of women’s athletics.

“We were out practicing on the grass fields where the ball rolls and bumps and you can’t even practice. It was awful,” Masters said. This treatment was because other sports, even those practicing in different seasons, “needed” Stutler Arena. “Sometimes we have to get off early because boys lacrosse is coming on after us. It’s like ‘We need to be done right at 5:30.’”

This is a school-wide struggle, especially surrounding women’s basketball. “The best example I have is the girl’s basketball team. They literally won State one year, and people only came to that state game,” Masters said.

This introduces the most controversial conversation surrounding women’s sports: basketball. It has been said by many basketball fans that the women’s game is less entertaining, but that is simply untrue. “I think we purposefully try to play a style that is more fun to watch. We try to play fast. We play defense hard,” Evans said. “I think if you have a group of kids that are committed to sharing the ball, and playing really really hard, it’s a lot of fun to watch.”

The quality of basketball doesn’t decrease with a different gender, even if the quantity of sports fans does. The girl’s basketball team this year was ranked higher than their male counterparts.

According to Denver Sports Magazine, on Feb. 14, Creek’s women’s team ranked 6th, and the men’s team didn’t make the top ten.

That’s not to say that a fan should choose between one gendered sport, but rather, go to both. Senior Spirit leader and Varsity Women’s Lacrosse team captain Sasha Lengwin even recognizes this, saying, “For the women’s basketball season, there would maybe be a row of people that showed up for the game and everyone packed in for the boys game. The girls were way better than the boys.”

Rankings aside, it is not that difficult to support both teams. It can even be essential in moments of stress. “It [the student section] is so crucial to shifting momentum. But it’s also just a source of pride for the team. You get the band there, you get kids there. It just makes you want to play harder,” Evans said.

It obviously means a lot to the game itself, but it means even more to the players.“When we had a big student section last year, that was my favorite thing ever,” Masters said. But if the solution will not come in the form of revolutionary student support, it has to come from somewhere else.

Lengwin proposes a solution: “I would say have the girls support the girls more. If girls started to go to more girls’ games, that’d be a good way to start the section,” she said. But ultimately, Lengwin feels as though this pressure falls on the students of Creek, and she’s right. “The students ourselves are responsible because we think the boys’ games would be way more fun when they’re just not,” Lengwin said.

Creek has the potential to act on its massive student population, and support its student population to the highest degree. “If almost 4,000 students understood the power that they had to support one another, in so many instances Cherry Creek would be more of a juggernaut in all things than it already is,” Evans said.

To be so outstanding in athletics is one thing, but to not have a student population that supports that accomplishment is honestly just embarrassing, especially when it boils down to a difference in gender.

This story won First Place Print News Sports Commentary from CSPA.