Memorial Stadium has columns and card stunts and Assembly Hall has the noise, but the University Ice Arena, home of the Illini hockey club and the Harassing Illini, may have the most attention-grabbing fan experience in Champaign.

The fan dialogue centers around one overriding declaration:

“You suck!”

The phrase isn’t simply uttered by a few overzealous fans like at major athletic events. Instead, it’s chanted like a mantra by nearly everyone in the crowd.

It’s shoehorned into virtually every song that blares over the house music. During the announcement of starting lineups, after a goal, before faceoffs – they’re all opportunities to assert the enemy’s inferiority.

The “Big Pond,” so named because of its extremely wide ice surface, provides an unparalleled closeness between fan and player. Rather than confine the fans to seats behind the plexiglass boards surrounding the ice, the Ice Arena bleachers were installed on top of the boards, placing the crowds right above the ice.

Those in the front row can clearly hear what the players are saying – and vice versa. From this vantage point, the Harassing Illini love to make themselves heard.

“With the football games, you feel like you’re one of hundreds of people there, but at the Ice Arena you know you’re being heard all the way across the arena, whether you’re in one corner and the ref is in the other,” Harassing Illini member said.

It makes for a very unique environment, especially during a memorable season. This year, the Illini are 32-0-0 and will be the No. 1 seed at the American Collegiate Hockey Association national tournament in March. As a result, crowds have packed the Ice Arena – especially during the last few series.

“We always get a lot of support from our fans, and we really appreciate it,” hockey club head coach Chad Cassel said.

A registered student organization, the Harassing Illini are the most rabid fans of Illini hockey, having taken ownership of bleacher section CC since 2002.

“It’s such a rush. Watching any team on TV play is nothing compared to actually going, being surrounded by people who actually love these people, and just immersing yourself in this craze,” member Noelle Folan said.

In recent years, the craze has been far greater than that of other varsity sports. For seniors like David Weiss, the current president of the Harassing Illini, the hockey club was the lone recourse from slumping varsity teams.

“I did Block I one season, and I do enjoy football, but with the skill level of our previous teams, I just didn’t get into it too much,” Weiss said.

So the group has been a mainstay at the Illini’s home games. Yet, to say that an opposing team “sucks” is too general, too vague for this group.

Since the group’s founding by former University students Dennis Timpanaro and Nick Bridge, the objective has been simple: to degrade particular opponents with any necessary means.

“(The founders) decided to take it kind of to the next step and start insulting specific players,” Weiss said. “It kind of grew from there.”

Armed with orange megaphones, red and yellow shirts, designed to be distinctive, and, more often than not, stating specific information about the opposing players, the Harassing Illini like to make it a more personal affair.

Folan and Patel are in charge of the group’s “research and development,” in which they look up opposing players’ online profiles and attempt to learn embarrassing information. In this sense, they embody the popular term “Facebook stalker.”

“We get the roster and we Facebook friend them, or if their profiles are open, we find out whatever we can,” Patel said. “It’s not really to be effective but to just add entertainment and yell things that make the people around us laugh.

“There are times where we have the refs come up to us afterwards, they’re like, ‘We can hear you on the ice.’ One of them said, ‘I know you’re making fun of me, but this is the most audience-friendly arena I’ve seen, and it’s really fun just to listen to you guys say the most random things.'”

Despite their comedic intentions, the group has countless anecdotes to describe the effectiveness of their chants.

“There was one that I wasn’t involved in where we made a goalie cry,” Weiss said.

“They found out his girlfriend had broken up with him a couple of days before the game.

“We told him the reasons why.”

Sometimes the attacks are directed at the players’ choice of career – like Western Michigan’s Sean McWhorter.

“He was a nursing major, so it was hilarious,” Patel said. “We were like ‘Sean, what do you like to do better? Give enemas or get rid of hernias?’ I think at one point their coach asked management to tell us to stop making fun of him.”

While they admit to incendiary comments and swearing – frequently – the Harassing Illini insist they are never violent, nor do they cross the line of fan interaction.

“A couple of games ago somebody in the next section that definitely was not Harassing Illini started spitting on the other players,” Folan said.

“That’s just going too far. We don’t throw anything on the ice. We don’t throw anything on the other fans.”

While it has been the Illini’s play on the ice that has brought fans to the Ice Arena, and will likely do so again for the last home series this weekend against Adrian College, the Harassing Illini like to think they add a unique touch to the Ice Arena environment that makes the crowd fans for life.

“It’s just more entertaining that way because (new fans) have never heard of Harassing Illini or they’ve never experienced it,” Patel said.

“So during the starting lineups when we say ‘you suck,’ you hear giggles all over the Ice Arena and you know there are hockey virgins there.”