Arizona women's basketball fans find family inside McKale Center

Fans buy season tickets, start talking to the others around them and become fast friends and, in some cases, more like family.

This could never happen in real life, or could it?

For three sets of UA women’s hoops fans, this is their reality.

Maybe it’s an only a Tucson thing or more aptly an only at Arizona women’s basketball games thing. Or is it something magical about those three random rows around McKale Center?

Whatever it is, the people in these three groups know they have special relationships, and it’s all because of Arizona women’s basketball.

They all sit in seats with incredible views of the action. A number of them have tickets to other UA sports. Just about everything else about their stories is different from when they connected — some three years ago and one group, during 2018-19, which is also known as the WNIT championship season — to how it all unfolded.

One is a large group, and it all started — and continues — with jokes and continuous banter during the games. Everything from commenting on the games that are played during the timeouts on the court, the performance of the Wildcats and the officials and even poking fun at each other.

Another is a couple who sits next to a woman who has had season tickets for years and got high-priority seating when the Wildcats hosted the NCAA Tournament. These three check in on each other all the time.

The final group came together when a young man — who is now 13 — got a season ticket for a birthday present and picked out his seat just two rows behind the Wildcats’ bench. The journey of these fans has taken them from cheering on the Wildcats together to being part of each other’s lives – a second family, if you will.

A wild bunch

Calvin Warner and Tony Davis are two veterans of the Air Force. The two go to Phoenix Suns and Cardinals games, as well as taking in UA football and men’s basketball games. They attended the 2022 first- and second-round games of the NCAA Tournament that UA hosted at McKale. The following season, they purchased season tickets in the midst of the rest of the group.

Warner said it was three games in when they all started talking to each other. It was one of Ed Lees’ funny or, as Warner likes to say, “wisecrack comments” that really got the ball rolling.

Even in this conversation ahead of Saturday’s Grambling State game, Lees was adding in his jokes.

“It’s a seasonal thing with him (Warner) and Tony; we take a committee vote to see who’s coming back next season,” Lees said.

During one of the timeouts in the first quarter, the UA pom squad tossed T-shirts into the crowd. Davis, who stands well over 6 feet tall, stood up and leaned forward to collect one in his hands.

Everyone in the group was laughing and smiling afterwards and wanted to see the shirt.

“Last season, there were usually two women who sit next to him and he was going for a T-shirt and fell over onto their laps — got jammed between their laps and those two seats,” Lees said during halftime.

“We’re all laughing. Tony was laughing so hard he couldn’t get up. We finally get him up. Cal helps him up, we all help him up. Cal goes, ‘Where the hell have you been?’ Ever since then, we have another seat, we call that the jump seat. We tell Tony, ‘If you are going to go for it, fall forward.’ We still laugh about it today.”

He did actually go forward this time, and Lees added with a laugh, “Well, he’s been in training.”

Lees, who calls this group “a wild bunch” is Laureen Welborn’s husband and the two can be found attending Barnes’ radio show every week during the conference season and were at the impromptu meet and greet for the women’s team a few weeks ago at Charro Chico. They’ve attended games for quite some time, but it wasn’t until three years ago, when they met Davis and Warner and others, that they found this type of connection.

When the second half starts, Welborn and the other women in the group comment on the Wildcats’ uptick in performance and of course, the seemingly inconsistent calls from the officials. Nothing is off-limits for this crew.

The fun travels with them as they sometimes meet up outside of McKale, like last year’s game against Seattle on New Year’s Eve. They ate at Trident and even ran into one of the refs, and you can bet there was some jawing back and forth.

Warner wasn’t surprised that there were other groups like his who are now friends inside and outside of McKale. He said it all comes down to Arizona coach Adia Barnes.

“She’s phenomenal; I can’t say enough about her,” Warner said.

Genuine and caring

David Archer and Robin Looney sat next to Barb Haller near center court seven years ago and just started talking. They had so much in common, including all Arizona sports, that they became friends almost instantaneously.

The couple started going to the games in Barnes’ first year as head coach (2016-17 season), but Looney remembers “that first year we were with Barb, we were celebrating (the WNIT championship) with her.”

“We sat over there,” Archer pointed across the court, during the warmups ahead of the Grambling State game. “We tried to get better seats, got these and there she was (sitting on the aisle, right next to them).”

“(That WNIT title run) was awesome and it was great to have Barb here with us,” Archer said. “When we hosted the NCAA here, it was funny because she’s got all the seniority and points, so she got good seats here, and we had to sit way up over there because we didn’t have that seniority. We joke about that.”

Besides those NCAA Tournament games, where you find Haller, you find Looney and Archer. That was the only time they’ve been separated for a home game until this season. Unfortunately, the 88-year-old Haller has made it through only 20 minutes of the early home games. And when Haller’s friends, also season ticket holders, who sit around McKale come to check in on her, they come directly to Looney and Archer to ask about her.

See, Haller, the lifelong UA fan, and Looney and Archer always talk before games — either with Haller calling them or Looney and Archer calling her.

The couple, who traveled to Palm Desert this week to watch Arizona play in the Acrisure Classic, said that it was easy to connect with Haller.

“She’s just that kind of person, everybody she meets, she makes eye contact; she shows you that she’s listening and she cares,” Looney said. “We want to honor her and give her that same kind of response. She deserves it.”

Instant family

Keeon Hudson, 13, comes from a sports family. One of his moms, Kimberlin Black Garcia, won an Arizona high school girls basketball state title in 2004 with Monument Valley and coached when Hudson was much younger. Hudson himself has been wearing UA gear and cheering for the Wildcats from early on. He’s worn red wigs and blue wigs and brought homemade signs to games — including the 2021 Final Four in San Antonio.

For his 9th birthday, he asked for a season ticket to Arizona women’s basketball.

“How do you not fall in love with that?” asked Nina Trasoff. “For four years he’s been sitting with us and we’ve just developed this family. We look forward to seeing each other. We hang out at the game.”

She added with a chuckle, “And I used to be taller than him.”

Hudson shot up to 6-1 a few years ago.

A moment that sparked the connection between Hudson and the others he sits with started during Hudson’s first game, as the humble, engaging young man stood up and cheered for his Wildcats.

A pair of fans behind him complained to security.

“I went up and I told the security guard, ‘He’s fine, where he is. We want him,’” Michael McCrory said.

For Trasoff, who has grandsons living in Florida and Texas, Hudson, “felt (like) family from the moment I met him.”

Everyone else in the group — McCrory, Dennis McLaughlin, Trasoff and Dawn Johnston, who has two young daughters of her own, Maeli and Seliana — support Hudson, the budding basketball star and straight-A student. The crew even gets reports about Hudson’s grades.

McLaughlin is the one who brings the Tootsie Roll Pops for everyone. Trasoff and Johnston have known each other for years and it was a natural extension when they joined this group. Johnston’s daughter, Maeli, is the one who brings the stats and memorizes everything about the Wildcats.

Hudson and McCrory started their own cheers along the way — others have joined in — starting with a favorite former Wildcat, Sam Thomas. Thomas played a relatively clean game, rarely getting called for fouls, and they would yell, “Sam doesn’t foul,” every time she got called for that miscue.

“We used to say ‘Ticky-Tack’ foul a lot,” Hudson said. “It was fun because we always got the attention of the (Arizona) bench. They would acknowledge us and they would be like, ‘Yeah, what they said.’”

Hudson is learning so much from the young women in Barnes’ program on how to act on and off the court. With their seats, right behind the bench, the group sees a lot of things up close. They see how the Wildcats encourage each other and the leadership of Jada Williams.

“One of the things Keeon pointed out to me was when Jada was sitting at the bench, she was, in essence, another coach for some of the younger ones and she’s a whole sophomore,” Trasoff said.