Season ticket members pay a lot of money to support our team. We buy tickets, jerseys, hats, t-shirts, food and drinks at the stadium. Yet sometimes it feels like that is all we are...bodies in the seats, money in other people’s pockets and a voice to yell and make the stadium loud for TV.

I found out this week that being a fan is more than that. We like to complain sometimes about what are the benefits of being a Sporting Kansas City STM? Why pay the money? Is it even worth it? It is worth it. It does mean something. I don’t just mean season ticket members. I mean every fan that feels passionate about this team.

Early this week, after a draw to Vancouver that felt like a loss with the tying goal scored in the 94th minute, I liked a tweet by LeAnn (@prairiegirl0028), another Sporting Kansas City superfan that I interact with on Twitter often. She tweeted, "Who wants to storm the entrance of Pinnacle with me one day this week with a ton of cheering-up and annoyingly inspirational posters for our guys @SportingKC? Maybe they need to see that we love them!" I liked the tweet, like I do a lot on Twitter. That tweet became a little surprise pep rally for the team at Pinnacle this past Saturday morning.

I am a teacher at a elementary school north of KC and I have a Sporting themed classroom. I was so happy that a couple of my students got to join me Saturday morning bright and early at 7:30 on the first day of their summer vacation. As the players started to arrive they looked very surprised and then realized what we were doing and took time to shake hands, meet people and thank us for being there. The whole team returned back out to the entrance at 8:30, the scheduled time for training to begin, and again thanked us all for being there and told us that it meant a lot to them and it was just what they needed.

Yesterday, Sporting Kansas City beat Seattle 3-2 with a fantastic hat trick from Johnny Russell. Post-match, when asked about the little pep rally the day before, he said that the surprise at practice was a huge morale boost and meant a lot to the team.

I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of tweets, photos and attention that the pep rally got. We were doing what I thought any good fan base would do. Telling our team that we were behind them no matter what. Letting them know that even when things weren’t going great we had their backs. It meant something to us as fans, but more importantly it meant something to the team. The team is good. The players are talented. They would have come out of this slump without our pep rally, but knowing that something that about 25 fans did for an hour on a Saturday morning could help them out in any way, well that makes all of the money spent every season worth it!

[Editor: Here is a thread of photos that LeAnn (the organizer of the event) posted to Twitter.]