The women’s basketball team is only a few weeks into its season, and the men’s tennis team’s main competitive season isn’t until the spring. But both teams have already seen a season’s worth of competition already this school year, having attended both football and volleyball games.

Nick Cavaday, a junior on the men’s tennis team, said he started regularly attending volleyball matches this season after realizing the potential for having a lively crowd on the end of Reynolds Coliseum where the team plays.

“We went into Reynolds, and we kind of saw how the setup was so perfect to have such a good atmosphere,” Cavaday said. “But yet when we went, we saw that it wasn’t as good as it could have been.”

So Cavaday and his teammates became frequent visitors to Reynolds to watch the volleyball team and give their support through vocal cheering. After a little while, he said the tennis team’s excitement wore off on the rest of the crowd.

“When we started having that excitement, then suddenly a lot of people start getting into it,” Cavaday said. “And then the whole dimension of the game changed because the whole crowd started enjoying it.”

Christian Welte, a sophomore teammate of Cavaday, said his team could identify with struggling to bring in fans — prompting him and teammates to go to the matches.

“It didn’t seem like they got much support, so we decided that since they were student athletes that we needed to help them out,” Welte said. “So we decided as a team that it wouldn’t be bad if we go out there and support them because we know we play on the other side of campus, and there’s not a lot of people that come out and support us.”

Welte noted some of the team’s catchy cheers come from things the players have seen on television, but he added his team comes up with plenty of its own chants as well.

“But some of them we just make up on the spot, just to try to make the game more exciting, just to try to get the fans into it a little more, try to make it a nice little atmosphere for the players,” Welte said. “And I know they definitely enjoy that.”

Meanwhile, the women’s basketball team and coaches were also regulars at volleyball matches this past season. Senior forward Marquetta Dickens said proximity to the volleyball court wasn’t the only reason her team went to the team’s matches.

“Right after we get out of practice, we can just go upstairs and go to the game,” Dickens said. “We know a lot of people from the volleyball team and [we go to] just to give them support, to let them know that we’re behind them.”

Dickens said the women’s basketball team also attends softball games.

“The softball players are always at our game. A lot of them are in a lot of classes together [with us],” Dickens said. “So they’ll come support us, and we support them back.”

At the same time, senior guard Ashley Key said there’s a simple reason student athletes go to watch other teams both on and off campus.

“There’s a sport going on,” Key said. “So of course we want to go see it because we’re athletes too.”

After losing seasons in football and volleyball, junior forward Khadijah Whittington said her team is trying to give the University a good season this year. But even though the volleyball team didn’t win an ACC match, Whittington said she was still able to draw inspiration from that team’s players as she entered her own season.

“The excitement that they bring — it makes you get ready for your season. Watching volleyball, the excitement that they [brought], even though they weren’t doing so good, they still brought excitement and enthusiasm to the game that they play and they love,” Whittington said. “And that just pumps you up for what you do best, like for us — basketball.”

And as athletes continue to go to their fellow student-athletes’ games and matches and cheer for them, there’s a common thread. Dickens, Welte and Cavaday said they hope the support they give makes the teams they cheer for want to return that encouragement.

But more than anything, Cavaday said it’s about helping other teams have the kind of competitive atmosphere that he looks for at his own matches.

“We love our people who come out to our games and just enjoy themselves because that’s what we’re trying to do when we’re playing. We’re just trying to enjoy ourselves and compete, and it just becomes a really good atmosphere,” Cavaday said. “It’s so much more enjoyable to play a sport under those conditions.”