If you go to a Clan game, you would be hard pressed to miss SFU’s self-proclaimed superfan Cedric Chen. Easily spottable sporting a red SFU t-shirt signed by various Clan athletes, Cedric attends nearly every game for all of SFU’s teams, where he can be heard loudly cheering the Clan on.
The thing you will probably remember about him though, are his creative — if slightly outdated — taunts. Frequently heard are renditions of Justin Bieber’s Baby (just the “Baby, baby, baby, oh” part), disses involving either Miley Cyrus or Bieber again, and perhaps most notably, invoking the name of former New York Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez — making light of Sanchez’s butt fumble against the New England Patriots back in 2012.
“Basically [Sanchez] just ran into the butt of one of his offensive linemen, and he fumbled the ball, and the defensive player from the New England Patriots picked up the ball, and ran it to the endzone for a touchdown,” Cedric says, explaining matter-of-factly how Sanchez became part of his bag of tricks.
“Since the NCAA has pretty strict rules against profanity and SFU has been carrying them out pretty good, I have to turn on my brain matter to find words and phrases that are essentially pointless — they won’t be considered profanity, but hopefully they will distract the enemy players.”
Does Cedric ever get in trouble for the things he yells?
“More times than I can count,” he responds. “[One time] when I was talking about having a crush on their sisters — now it’s prohibited, so I can only talk about Kim Kardashian.”
For Cedric, the duty of being SFU’s superfan is not one he takes lightly. He measures his nights based on how well he is able to throw off the other team.
“Our teams are improving, but so are the enemy teams, so if you stick to your old tricks, sooner or later they will come up with countermeasures. So most of the time you have to improvise, but you also have to think ahead regarding what kind of tactics are the most effective in distracting the enemy teams,” he notes.
“If I was able to make the enemy team miss a lot of free throws, then I think I did a pretty good job. In contrast, if I wasn’t able to distract the enemy enough so they miss a lot of shots then I go like, [long sigh],” he says. “It makes me frustrated.”
Born and raised in Foshan, China, Cedric came to Canada in 2007 to study at Columbia College, and came to SFU in 2009 to begin his bachelor’s degree in linguistics. SFU also gave Cedric a chance to embrace his love of sports, by playing intramural sports such as dodgeball, soccer, and basketball, and of course, providing easily accessible games to watch.
“I grew up with this passion for sports, and I largely inherited that from my dad who has been a lifetime basketball and soccer fan. Whenever we’re watching sports games, he yells as loudly as I do,” he says. “When I was an undergrad I lived on campus, and for those that live on campus, the most easily accessible sport events are the Clan games.”
His initial interest with the Clan games wasn’t just out of sport. “Actually, I first went to the Clan games as a sport photographer for The Peak,” he notes, explaining that when he first came to SFU, his goal was to be a photographer for The Peak, having checked out the student newspaper before transferring here. He even earned an award in his first semester as a contributor. However, that was before Cedric’s inner sports fan became too big to ignore.
“That went on for about a season. And then for some reason, the athletic department told the then-photo editor [that] I was being too loud as a photographer, so he stopped giving me photo assignments,” he says. “I was like, ‘oh well.’ If a photographer can’t be loud, a fan can.”
“That’s how I started yelling and cheering, and I would say discovered my potential.”
His new vocation did have some challenges — particularly when he was the only Clan fan at the games.
“For the first two years — which were 2010 and 2011 — things were pretty dismal and SFU fans [were] easily outnumbered even on our home turf,” he notes.
“In my first year of being a superfan, during the volleyball season, when the Western Washington fans came to the West Gym en masse, that was the first time I felt so badly humiliated. I was almost the only SFU fan other than the parents and the relatives of the players in the West Gym,” Cedric explains. “Western Washington brought one battalion of fans, and West Gym practically became their home turf — [I was] so humiliated.”
Before long, Cedric became a part of the event himself.
“To be honest, at the beginning I didn’t pay that much attention to the fans around me,” he says. “That was until [. . .] one time I was at the Mountain Shadow, getting a drink, and the volleyball team recognized me.
“That’s how I started to realize I had a thing.”
Despite the confidence he exerts on the sidelines, belting whatever chant he can come up with as loud as he can with with no apparent care of what the audience around him thinks, Cedric describes himself as an introvert.
“In China, in a social situation, you are supposed to [be] outgoing, and be this, and be that, and be like, ‘Hello, hello.’ But I’m an introvert, and whenever I’m dining with my parents and their friends, I just want to sit quiet instead of joining their conversation, but sometimes that’s just not acceptable.”
“My parents sometimes blame me for being too westernized [. . .] in norms and values,” he laments. “Here in Canada, most of the time I get to decide when I get to hang out [and] with whom — I like to keep it in small groups of people of two or three, including me. Four maximum.”
For Cedric, the cheering provides a relief from the stresses and frustrations of school.
“As you know, as an undergrad student, you’ve got tons of materials to go over, several papers to write, and you have to study for exams. Over the time, you get quite stressed and since I’m not as social [. . .] yelling would be my primary outlet of stress.”
Part of that frustration was the feeling of having his creativity stifled by rigid academic writing policies — as opposed to the sidelines, where he could have some fun.
“The biggest challenge for me was writing papers in the proper styles. I mean, I can cover the points, but sometimes I just can’t help using a little bit of flair here and there in my papers, and my TAs really didn’t like it,” he says. “I didn’t like writing white-bread papers, you know what I mean? [Imitates sound of writing boring papers], straight, narrow, and tasteless.”
Despite still appearing at nearly every Clan game, Cedric received his bachelor’s degree in 2013. Now he does freelance work in translation and interpretation.
“I don’t like the looking-for-clients part, but when I get to sit down, open up the dictionaries, and start doing some actual translation work, that’s what I enjoy.” he notes. “It’s mostly helping somebody out, building up my profile, hopefully drawing some attention from some larger clients.”
Despite his earlier disdain for “white bread papers,” he admits that the Clan games still provide an escape from an increasingly complicated life after graduation.
“After I graduated, the real world has proven to be more stressful than undergrad [life] by at least two times,” he observes.
“It’s been challenging [to go to games not as an SFU student], three times as challenging as when I was living on campus. When I was living on campus, it was like a 10–20 minute walk from my room to the sight of competition. Now it’s an hour and a half.”
However, his heart is still with the Clan, and plans to be on the sidelines for a while longer — at least until he scores “a strictly nine-to-five job.” For now though, the superfan lives on, and you can be sure to catch him at the next Clan game.
