On a typical game day in Iowa City, nearby Kinnick Stadium is swallowed by a sea of black and gold, but on Friday, July 3, a different color took over: banana yellow.
The party ahead of the Savannah Bananas’ first stop of the weekend at Kinnick, a part of the Banana Ball, started well before the game. Fans braved the humid 90-degree day for the preshow of the exhibition baseball team, fondly called “Before the Peel.”
More than 3,000 fans packed the Evashevski Drive side of Kinnick Stadium for the preshow event, which featured a romp of entertainment from the Savannah Bananas spirit squad, entering a round of friendly competition with the challenging team, The Firefighters’ spirit squad.
Leading the crowd in chants and cheers along with singing and dancing to popular hype songs like the Village People’s “YMCA,” Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the USA,” fitting for the Fourth of July holiday, and “Sweet Caroline” by Neil Diamond, replaced the “dun dun dun” ad lib with “banana.”
Before welcoming the marching band and the players for both teams to the stage for one last hype moment before the gates for the game opened.
The Friday game will stream on the Savannah Bananas’ YouTube channel and will also air on truTV at 7 p.m. CT.
In addition to the Savannah Bananas YouTube channel, the July 4 game will air at 7 p.m. CT on the Roku Sports Channel.
Jessica Rish is an entertainment, dining and education reporter for the Iowa City Press-Citizen. She can be reached at [email protected] or on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @rishjessica_
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.press-citizen.com ’
