By Kayla Faria

Sporting a red scarf around his neck, Adam “Stripes” Lauer gives “fair warning” to the first row of the student section. He shouts the goalkeeper’s name, and then introduces himself. “My name is Stripes and this is my Crew. Get to know us because we’re going to be all over you for the next 90 minutes!”

The Crew, a group of dedicated fans who passionately support the University of Maryland men’s soccer team from the stands behind the net of opposing goalkeepers, describes its mission as bringing a “European football atmosphere to Ludwig Field with a PG filter.” But the mission of getting inside the goalkeeper’s head starts long before the Terps’ opponents take the field.

The fan base uses social networking sites to research and learn more about opposing goalkeepers, and then incorporates that information into their cheers and jeers.

“Before the games, I’ll go find the goalkeeper [on social networks]. I’ll look up his old MySpace account and I’ll get his phone number – all publicly available information [and] stuff that the goalkeeper doesn’t expect that we’re going to know,” sophomore government and politics major Sam Ward said.

To get in the goalkeeper’s head, the group has created a fake Facebook account, complete with pictures, under the name “Jenny Crewe.” The account’s major and school changes with each opponent as a way to increase the likelihood an opposing goalkeeper will accept a “friend” request from Jenny Crewe.

Engaging with the goalkeeper on Facebook is nothing new for The Crew.

“Back in the day when Facebook allowed you to poke anybody without any regard to if you knew him or not, the Crew would literally poke the goalie to death before games,” former Crew Vice President Joe Capriotti said.

“It is a little creepy,” he said. But “it’s just something that we do to try to agitate them and get in their head before they even get here.” Capriotti said he once found out the license plate number of the vehicle driven by the opposing goalkeeper’s mother.

The Crew has also used Twitter to “aggravate” opposing goalkeepers.

“We live-tweeted the game to the [UMBC] goalie,” junior English major Abby Bjork said. The tweets consisted of factual statements like “And he goes to the left,” along with “And he goes to the right.”

Once the game starts, the student-run group chants everything from the names of the goalkeeper’s intimate partners to their phone numbers in an effort to make Ludwig one of the toughest college soccer environments in the country.

“When it gets in the heat of games [we] make it as loud as possible and intimidating,” Lauer, the Crew president said. “It’s very hard to communicate, especially on set pieces, when we’re all yelling how many people to be in the wall and we’re telling them to go left or right.”

Lauer said that The Crew has more pro-Maryland chants than it does anti-opponent ones, but it does happen to have a lot of material to use against the other team.

“We have about 12 different supporting Maryland cheers and in between [cheers] we just make fun of the goalie,” he said.

“We look up home addresses. We look up occupations in high school.”

Still, the Crew considers itself to be a well-behaved fan base with a “PG filter” that does not engage in personal attacks or use profanity.

“We know their mom’s name, we know their dad’s name, and we know their girlfriend’s name. But we won’t say anything vulgar about them,” Lauer said. “We make sure we don’t cross the boundaries.”

Crew members understand that they are ambassadors of the university, even though their group is not officially sponsored by it.

“We want people to have fun while they’re out here, but we also want to keep it clean,” said Capriotti, who earned his degree in mechanical engineering in 2011.

Once the self-proclaimed “Will Smith of fan bases” for its clean and witty banter, the Crew continually monitors its behavior during matches.

“We never get out of hand and it’s hard to control. We started to self-police, [but] you’re always going to have kids that show up [who] say they’re part of the Crew. They’ll show up intoxicated and they’ll get kicked out, then the Crew gets a bad name. But in reality, we don’t have control over that,” Lauer said.

Still, Lauer thinks that the athletes at the other end of his taunts shouldn’t be surprised.

“If you’re going to be an athlete going to a D-1 collegiate school,” he continued, “heckling comes with the territory.”

The Crew was founded in 2003 by Michael Mastrantuno, a student who hoped to be a soccer team walk-on but was unsuccessful. It is funded entirely by students. To help raise money for road trips and tailgating, the Crew sells marque soccer scarves for $20 apiece.

Still, the Crew maintains an informal relationship with the university’s marketing department. In the past, the department has provided school T-shirts and occasionally picked up the tab for bus rides to major away games.

Both longtime and newer members of the Crew, however, credit its existence outside of the university as part of the reason for its exponential growth – from a handful of students in the beginning to an estimated 3,500 fans at Friday night games.

“It’s intangible,” Ward said, “being [an] independent group that’s there for the team first and not the athletic department.”

Lauer said that he considers the Crew a “support section” or “fan base” rather than a club, which makes filling out the paperwork, writing a constitution and raising funds for the Student Government Association – steps to become an officially recognized university club, a “little ridiculous.”

“It creates more work than it’s worth,” he said.

For Lauer, school sponsorship would also mean having to be organized, something that is anathema to the Crew’s ethos.

“We’re actually very disorganized,” Lauer said. “Our Facebook integration is about as organized as we get.”

Capriotti, the former vice president, agreed that the group’s disorganization is a strength and a testament to the “beauty” of how it works.

Members of the group once used email chains and a blog, but its online presence now exists primarily as a Facebook fan page that includes all of the group’s cheers, along with road trip information.

However, Brian Klenk, a 2009 alumnus, said that the group’s ability to travel in numbers for road trips has expanded because of an added focus on organizing. “We’ve become a little more organized, which is funny because we’re still not all that organized.”

The Crew considers itself an inclusive group given that joining is as easy as showing up and cheering on the team.

Lauer’s pitch to potential Crew recruits is simple: “You feel much more connected to the team,” he said.

Lauer said that a “sense of intimacy” is what makes the Crew experience unique. “When you’re at the Crew, you are right over the top of the goalie. The players, when they score, do celebrations right in front of us,” he said.

Lauer describes a positive correlation between the team’s continued success and the Crew’s expansion.

“We continue to recruit great players because we have such a great environment. We’ve had recruits come out and sit in the stands with us and been like ‘I absolutely love this,’” he said.

Although many Crew members credit their group’s growth to the quality of the team (the Terps are ranked first in the nation) and popular head coach Sasho Cirovski, others point to their group’s leadership.

“Everyone is drawn towards the personalities that run this,” sophomore Dylan French said. “It’s just people that want to have a good time and want to include everyone else in having a good time.”

While the Crew can be cold to opposing goalkeepers, the trademark scarves worn by its members represent a shared bond, exposing their warm-hearted passion for the game.

“The warm, open welcome that was shown to everyone here [is] what keeps people coming back,” Klenk said. “There’s no cold shoulders.”