By Matt Collette

“Sieve! You suck!” Shout that sentence while you can because Athletics Director Peter Roby is calling for Husky fans to stop cheering against other teams, and instead focus their cheering for the Huskies.

Roby said he got the idea for his “Positively Northeastern” initiative after getting a new Massachusetts license plate that reads “GO NU.” He wanted fans to be able to show their support toward Northeastern teams without being negative or disruptive to others.

In a letter on www.GoNU.com, Roby wrote, “We can create a fun and exciting atmosphere for our teams to compete in without being rude or insensitive to our opponents. We should remember that our teams compete against student-athletes from other universities with the same goals as our own students. They have families and friends who care for them just as our athletes have families and friends concerned for their success.”

“I don’t think it has much effect on the players in the game. They’re much too focused,” Roby said in an interview with The News. “Fans are really just talking to themselves.”

Often, Roby said he feels fans are trying to one-up their friends, which can create a negative impression of Husky sports.

Roby said the athletics department wanted to send a “strong message to fans,” and that disruptive fans would be removed from sporting events.

“If it’s an inappropriate type of cheering, absolutely [they would be removed],” he said.

Tim Fouche, vice president of the DogHouse, the rowdy fan section that attends many Husky sporting events, said he understood Roby’s intentions, but said the DogHouse probably wouldn’t change its cheers.

“Well, I see where he’s coming from,” he said. “But it’s part of the college experience to get on the other team and give them a hard time. You want to give them as much crap as you can give them.”

Men’s hockey captain and junior forward Joe Vitale said he doesn’t think Roby’s stance against negative cheering is necessary.

“We’re such a loud and fast game that you don’t really know if fans are cheering for you or against you. Especially at Matthews, which is such a small place, it doesn’t really have that much of an effect on you,” he said.

The cheering can even help the Huskies, Vitale added.

“It is a huge advantage when the DogHouse is heckling the other team’s goalie during the first and third periods. There should be some guidelines, you shouldn’t swear. But it definitely has some advantages,” he said. “Goalies hate playing here because for the first and third periods it’s really intense.”

Vitale said rowdy fans are part of the experience when playing at Matthews and that it shouldn’t be taken away.

“Maybe there should be some sort of guidelines, but it shouldn’t be abolished all together,” he said.

Hockey head coach Greg Cronin also said that while he doesn’t appreciate the negativity of some fans at games, preventing it will be difficult to enforce.

“I think it’s difficult to police what people say,” he said. “[But] there should be codes of conduct. I don’t want to hear vulgarity as a coach, I don’t want to hear negative things yelled at other players. It’s unfair and it’s insensitive.”

The practice, Cronin said, is not something that happens just at Northeastern. Last year, Boston University banned obscene and profane cheers at sporting events and said it would immediately eject any student who used them, the Daily Free Press, BU’s student newspaper, reported.

“I mean, the DogHouse, it’s not foul, it’s not mean-spirited in what we do. We just want to make teams think twice about what they’re doing when they come into our building, when they’re coming to knock us down,” Fouche said.

While most of the cheering Roby wants eliminated happens at men’s hockey games, he said he has seen it at other sporting events as well. At a basketball game last year, he heard fans shouting at the opposing team and asked them to stop, he said.

“We think that fans can find creative ways to root for their teams without being inappropriate,” he said.