On Jan. 26, the Gunn boys’ basketball teams faced cross-town rival Palo Alto High School (Paly), and the administration faced the worst Sixth Man Club scheme ever, Assistant Principal Tom Jacoubowsky said.

Sixth Man Club members initiated two unrelated plans. Students targeted Paly player Dom Powell with a fake Facebook account, and Gunn fans revealed T-shirts reading “Puck Faly” during the middle of the first quarter.

Right before the second half of the game started, a junior whose name is being withheld and some of his friends distributed pictures of a classmate they invented named Kristen to the members of the Sixth Man Club, the junior said. The club began shouting “Dom!” repeatedly, and when he turned to the stands to look, members of the club held up pictures of Kristen and chanted “She’s not real.”

Jacoubowsky noticed this, but was puzzled by what was happening. “I couldn’t quite understand why all these people were holding up a picture and chanting something, and I couldn’t quite figure out what they were chanting,” he said. He later asked two students to leave the game and learned of the creation of a false Facebook account.

This display was the result of the junior’s plan, which involved creating a fake student and communicating with Powell through text messages and Facebook messages.

The purpose of creating the fake account was to help the varsity team win the game, the junior said. “It was to help the team,” he said.

Though Powell laughed off the matter at the game, the junior said, the prank did accomplish the intended goal: throwing off Powell’s game. “I was dying on the bench,” Powell said. “My teammates had to tell me to get my head in the game.”

The matter was not a laughing one for the Gunn administration, however, Jacoubowsky said. “We had to draw a line,” he said. “We don’t know when it’s going to be a situation where ‘oh, it’s okay to do, they all like it,’ or someone gets hurt.”

While the junior revealed his role in the incident, the administration does not disclose such confidential information. The administration took disciplinary action in this situation, but the student’s punishment was less harsh than it could have been, Jaboubowsky said. “It was not as punitive as it could have been if we felt his intention was to really be cruel,” he said.

According to Principal Noreen Likins, this incident constituted a crime. “The Facebook incident is a case of cyber bullying, which is illegal,” she said.

The junior remains optimistic, despite his one-day suspension and prohibition of attendance to Gunn sporting events for the year. “It was fun and funny and helped Gunn get four more points closer to a win,” he said. “Everybody here, including admin[istration]—cross my fingers—wants Gunn to win. I honestly think it helped Gunn come closer to winning.”

The false Facebook account was not the only scheme the Sixth Man Club cooked up for the game. An anonymous member of the Sixth Man Club created shirts that read “Puck Faly” in hopes of distracting the Paly players. While the real meaning of “Puck Faly” can easily be figured out, the Sixth Man Club described it as an acronym for a charity fund, called the Palo Alto United Charitable Kids Fund Assisting Leadership in Youth, according to the shirt’s creator.

The shirts were planned to be “unveiled” at the Jan. 26 game, but the club sold 150 of them to students beforehand. According to the shirt’s creator, students responded “really well” to these shirts and “jumped all over them once they became available.” Living up to the acronym’s meaning, the profit the club made from selling the shirts might be donated to charity in the near future.

Members of the Sixth Man Club wore “Puck Faly” shirts to the varsity game under sweatshirts, then revealed them at the first tip-off. Paly fans, sitting on the opposite of the gym, noticed the shirts first. The administration did not notice the shirts until later, when they noticed the reactions of Paly students and parents. “At the first time-out, the admin team decided to go to the club and ask them to turn their shirts inside out,” Likins said. “When they argued with us, we gave them two minutes to think it over and decide whether to turn their shirts inside out, cover them or leave the game.”

Some students abided by the administration’s request and were allowed to remain in the gym. Others, however, refused and were asked to leave. “There was a lot of arguing at the admin as a mob,” Likins said, “and eventually some students were removed from the gym because they refused to follow the admin’s directions.”

Junior Karen Scrivner was in the middle of this “mob,” without a “Puck Faly” shirt. “The admin came over and started telling them to turn their shirts inside out and they just kept on screaming and screaming,” she said. “I told [one member], who was one of the people yelling, to just stop it, but he said to me, ‘No, one person stopping isn’t going to do anything” and just kept on screaming.’”

According to Likins, the mob mentality significantly contributed to the club’s overall refusal to cooperate with the administration. “There’s really a group mentality that seems to take over, especially to pick on a specific player or deflect the administration,” she said. “I know that many of the students would not have said the things that they did at the game if they were there by themselves. But when you have the entire club there, mob mentality enters and makes them do things that they would not do otherwise.”

Likins said she thinks the t-shirts were a form of retaliation against Paly. “Last year at a Gunn-Paly game at Paly, there were Paly students wearing shirts that said “Paly > Gunn” on the front and had a Paly student urinating on Gunn on the back,” she said. “I think the ‘Puck Faly’ shirts were in a way a form of retaliation from built up resentment against the Paly shirts.”

Senior Sports Commissioner and President of the Sixth Man Club Kelsey Feeley said she thought the club “shouldn’t have stooped to that level to retaliate for Paly’s shirts.”

The administration is now taking steps to “change the direction of the Sixth Man Club,” Likins said. The administration is working with Student Executive Council and the Sixth Man Club to prevent future similar incidents with the club. “We wanted to discuss what is and is not okay with the club through students, not the admin, because we felt the club would be open to more ideas this way,” Likins said.

The administration has set limits on what the club can and cannot do. “We can shout and scream and wear our Sixth Man t-shirts however much we want,” Likins said. “But rude actions, shirts and personal attacks like the Facebook account are unacceptable.”

Senior Sam Drexler, a member of the Sixth Man Club, said the administration should restrict the club less. “Our actions can have a negative effect on the other team, but it’s part of the duty of the Sixth Man Club,” he said. “As much as the admin[instration] doesn’t like it, being ‘negative’ towards the other team has a positive effect for Gunn.”

Drexler said the administration is too harsh in its limitations compared to other schools. “Out of all the schools that I have gone to games at, Gunn definitely has the most active admin in policing the game. They treat us with kid gloves and assume we are immature people.”

While the administration hopes to “change the direction” of the Sixth Man Club, Feeley said changes will only affect individual people. “As a group, we’ve done a pretty good job of being slightly respectful to other teams,” she said. “[The rude] cheers are always going to happen, and it’s hard to stop a big group of people.”

The club, however, hopes it will be able to “go back to the original idea of the club in the future,” Drexler said. “We should be loud and supportive and helping the team,” he said. “People cheering in the stands is part of the game and the players know that. Every visiting player knows they are going to get heckled at opposing gyms; that’s just the way it is.”