“The Banana Boys”: Giving Back Through Baseball

OMAHA, Neb. (WCBI) — By now, you’ve seen them during a Mississippi State baseball broadcast throughout the NCAA tournament.

One of the driving forces behind the ‘Rally Banana’ craze, adorned in buttoned-downs covered in the yellow fruit, are “The Banana Boys.”

Behind the nickname is upcoming Mississippi State seniors Chip Goza and Storm Davis.

Goza, a Flora-native, and Davis, a Benton-native, said their approach was to join a conglomerate of banana-outfitted Mississippi State fans in Nashville after the sensation kicked off in Tallahassee.

“Chip was like, there’s going to be a million people with shirts on, so I’m just hoping that one of these shirts we have, no one else had on,” Davis said, “and we kind of wanted to be different…we got there, Chip kind of looked at me and said, ‘I think we’re the only people with a banana shirt on, its kind of just us.”

Goza explained during the Super Regional against Vanderbilt, the two knew exactly when the broadcast had the camera directly on them, because “our phones were just buzzing.”

Goza and Davis are Bulldogs’ baseball faithful, going to every home game in the new Dudy Noble Field this past season.

When the Diamond Dawgs battled its way to Omaha, the upcoming seniors were determined to follow along.

“We went to Tallahassee, we went to Hoover for the SEC tournament, we went to Nashville for the [Super Regional], we got to find a way to get to Omaha to cheer these guys on…”, Davis said.

“We were thinking about how we were going to pay for it, and my dad jokingly said, ‘start a gofundme.’ I kind of thought about it, and I texted our group message of a couple of my buddies and said, ‘It can’t hurt’, thinking we’d get like $300 out of it.”

But thanks to some help from some friends, including Mississippi State junior centerfielder Jake Mangum, and baseball fans from across Mississippi and the country, the funds came pouring in.

Not wanting to pocket the money for himself, Goza said his father also gave him the idea to donate the additional funds to Blair E. Batson’s Children’s Hospital in Jackson, Mississippi.

As of the first pitch of the Saturday’s game one between the Bulldogs and Washington, the account had raised more than $2,000.

“I had no idea it was going to get anywhere close to this,” Goza explained.

“There are actually three kids from our hometown that are at Blair E. Batson right now, so it just kind of hit close to home.”

“…everyone can almost say, these guys want to go to Omaha to cheer on the dawgs, but you know, they’re trying to get it to Batsons, and that’s something people can relate to because Batson does so much good for everyone,” Davis said.

While the Bulldogs are continuing an improbable run towards the school’s first team national championship, two Mississippi kids making are using a hobby to make a difference in their community.