In the latest of her "How To" series, Emma Quayle caught up with Mark Costello to kick off #MembersWeek. Mark leads the Orange Army during the important task of banner making.
So, when does the process all start?
The club will send through the words, first of all. They’ll work out what they want it to say, and the only issue we sometimes have is running out of room. And they also provide us with any graphics that need to go on it; sometimes we have sponsors’ logos or if a player has a milestone game, we’ll put a picture of the player on the banner. Last year we did a big one for Heath Shaw and once we’d finished with the banner we tore it off and stuck it in the changerooms. It was a three metre picture of Heater, in the change rooms for the rest of the season.
When does the cheer squad get together to make it?
We get there around 6pm, usually on a Wednesday or Thursday night depending on when the team is playing and whether the boys are traveling or not. We make the banners in the changerooms, and occasionally over the road from the club in the netball centre. We usually get between 6-10 people along, and sometimes we don’t get out until 10 or 11pm at night.
What are the banners made of?
These days we use rolls of orange plastic tablecloth material. We double that over; it’s fairly thin and you can see right through it, so we have to double layer it to make it less transparent. We also have a fabric banner that we do as well, which is just a cloth banner. It doesn’t look quite as good and of the traditionalists don’t like us using it, because the boys can’t actually break through and tear it. With the plastic one, they’re able to run right through it.
How do you put it all together?
We lay the tablecloth down first, usually six rolls of it. And then we tape the layers together. I have an Excel spreadsheet that shows us how to do it and we use a hell of a lot of sticky tape to do it. I’d say we go through 15-20 rolls a night to get it all done. Once we have the shell tapes together we place the letters out on the banner and tape the letters down, making sure they’re all in line and spaced evenly apart. There’s been some famous misspellings of players’ names and things over the years at different clubs, so you don’t want to get that wrong. We haven’t been caught yet, touch wood. I never mock clubs when things go wrong, because it could be us. While we’re taping the letters down, we also cut some small slits in the banner to make it easy for the players to break through. And at the same time we make sleeves for the poles, which is just a lot of tape on either end of the banner so that on game day, all we have to do is put the poles through the holes and tape the banner to the poles.
How many people does it take to hoist it up on game day?
It only takes 12 but the AFL allows us to have 24 people out. I try to share it around to give people the experience, but we give first preference to official paid-up members of the Orange Army. I have a map of where we need everyone to stand on the banner, so we make sure everyone knows their position and what they need to do, when. The poles sit in a base plate so we need a person to stand on each base plate, then we need a couple of people to raise each pole. And on each pole there are three ropes, so we try to get at least two people on each rope to raise it. We have our official photographer out there as well. We want to remember them all and we want people to remember to please hold the pole up and not be fishing in their pocket for their phone!
What’s it feel like to do all that work and then see the players take three seconds to bust through?
That’s something I’ve mentioned over the years; you feel like a chef, like you spend hours on something and it’s gone in two seconds! That’s one thing, and we do have some challenges. The biggest one is winds. Down in Canberra they were thinking about cancelling the banner one day because the winds were so high. It’s a huge amount of sail space that we have and it can be quite dangerous if the banner blows over. The poles are six metres high and could easily clobber someone. So we have to be careful raising it and careful lowering it as well, particularly when the players run out with little kids. We want everyone to be safe before we start lowering it.
Do you have one or two favourite banners from over the years?
The Grand Final will always be the most special, being the first grand final one we’ve ever done. And we took a bit of a risk: we used the plastic tablecloth for all of last year but when it got to the grand final we decided to do a crepe banner. We usually don’t use crepe paper because a lot of cheer squads have had trouble with it falling apart when it gets wet. It can fall apart and all you’re left with is tape on the poles. We did a double layer one just to make sure it was strong enough because the last thing we wanted was to have something go wrong on grand final day. That’s the most memorable banner, for me, just because it was such a special day for the club.
