Homecoming at Your School
 

Hey everybody,

I know it's kind of early to be talking about Homecoming, but I just became Homecoming Chair at my university and I would love to hear how Homecoming is done on your campus. I am looking to improve our Homecoming. Do you guys do floats? If so how does it work? What else do you do? Do you have any ideas for Homecoming Themes? I would love to hear from you! Thanks for your help!

ChiOChic

Since there are 6 Fraternitys and only 3 Soroitys at school and that sucks, Because of the expense of building a float we try to work with a Soroity to split the costs! No one decorates the House like we did when I was there! Do they there?

Many times as people come to Homecoming, they see what the Greeks do via the Parade and House Decorations and form opinions about you. That is the only thing that they know!

Imagine a parade with no Greeks involved? High School Bands, Shriners, and Cow People and Horse Shit! Would love to see the Horses first in this kind of Parade. OOPS no more parades!:D

If you have time, or make time, as many Parents come to Homecoming and many are Alums of the Chapter!

Do something for them but unless they are members of the Org. Dont take them to your party!:D

We don't have a homecoming parade, but we do lawn displays that are basically the same premise. Other than that there are just a lot of events during the week that you get points for if you get a certain percentage of your house to participate. There is a "fun Run" on the Sunday, a diversity event, pep rally, banner contest, a Kareoke contest, and the Husker Howl variety act competition. In 2000 they had Tom Green come perform during the week too, and in the past they've had other big name performers. Supposedly they are going to have someone big come this year.

As for improving Homecoming, I'm not really sure what youre looking to do, but make it so that your freshmen don't view it as a chore. It seemed that all the freshmen/new members I knew weren't that into the whole week, but that the upperclassmen were. I know that we made that week a brotherhood week, and had some events to foster brotherhood, things like alumni coming for witness talks and a roundtable talking about what Beta has meant for everyone, also a basketball tournament was held the saturday before Homecoming week. So perhaps you could do something like that...whatever would increase sisterhood, maybe a ChiO only social event on the preceeding Saturday.

We do ours during the week of Valentine's day, during basketball season.

We have blood drives, mini-parades in the cafeteria, "Big Man on Campus", and of course the game and dance.

This is the BEST part, where all the drama begins!
We have a Greek vs. Roman (non-greek) powderpuff game for the girls.

If it wasn't for the greeks (social, professional, and service) we would not have homecoming. I think the HC participation is 80% greek.

Iowa State Cyclones
 

Here's a link to our Homecoming 2001 Homepage

http://www.alumni.iastate.edu/studen...001/index.html

The biggest events are lawn display, Yell-Like-Hell (kind of Cheer competition), and tailgate (for football, duh!).
Eventhough Iowa State homecoming is NOT a Greek event, about 85% of the participation comes from Greek community (yay!)

Just a reminder, Iowa State has a big Greek Community (28 fraternities, 14 sororities, 13% Greek population).
:cool:

Hey everybody,

Thank you so much for responding!! I have gotten some great ideas that I am definetely going to try to incorporate into our Homecoming! I do have another question...about how much does it cost to do a lawn display or a homecoming float? Just wondering ~ also how does the selection process for Homecoming King and Queen work at your school? Thanks again! LICO~

Hey ChiOChick!
Our homecoming is a huge deal and we had different classes of competition for the floats to make it more fair.

Class A would spend $800-$1200
Class C, on the other hand, spends $200 - $500

Class A would be a pairing of usually 2 fraternities, a sorority and a residential hall

Class C would be an organization like ROTC or SADD.

The homecoming queen/king- it was a combo effort. The student body got to vote but also a percentage was the interview conducted by the administration of the school.


:) You'll do a great job!

At Nebraska, Homecoming really tends to be a Greek event, although a 2 out of the 9 residence halls participated this year as well.

As for the money spent on floats/displays: that depends on the house. I think most of the fraternities budget around a 1000 dollars for homecoming costs. However SigEp budgets a whole lot more...rumor is close to $5000, but everyone knows it is more than every other house. However it doesn't always mean that they win the display. You can't tell from the pictures but the towers they build to be a tall as their house are just construction scaffolding draped with rolls of cloth. The basically do the same thing every year with the scaffolding. Meanwhile, you can't tell from the picture, but Beta's (my house) is done completely with tissue paper, chicken wire and wood. We did run over budget, but basically that was due to the insane amount of tissue paper we had to use. We pretty much cleared out every sheet of green tissue paper in the city of Lincoln.

My recomendations to win the float/display would be, make sure the idea works with the theme of the week, and more importantly that all the elements of your display make sense with in the scheme of the display. Obviously you don't want people walking past and wondering what one segment of your display has to do with anything. From the picture you can't really tell about my house's display, but it's obviously a combine, and along with the upcoming teams we were goign to play, we staked stolen cornstalks, and at the end of the teams their are roses to symbolize the Rose Bowl. Another little touch we added was the Years that Nebraska won the National championship coming out of the combine's auger.
The other reccomendation I have would be to use the tissue paper and chicken wire method of "pomping", it takes more time, but it looks so much better than just laying sheets of paper over a frame.

Good luck next year!

Our homecoming is done very differently than what all of you have mentioned. First, all school organizations are invited to nominate one member to represent their organization. A lot of times only 10 or so organizations, mostly greek, nominate someone from their organization to compete for homecoming king and queen. During homecoming week, there are jars for each individual set up in our cafeteria area. People donate money into the jars all week. At the end of the week, whoever has the most money is crowned king and queen. Pennies count as negative points and all other coins and bills count as positive points. Competition for king and queen is huge among greeks.

Saturday evening we have our homecoming crowning area out in our universitiy's patio area. A lot of greek alum and university alum come out that evening to celebrate our univerity's homecoming. It is a mini-festival; there is bbq, chicken on a stick, beer, margaritas, etc. The king and queen are announced and that is the end of our homecoming. There is not much to our homecoming. We do have a relatively small campus, with about 8,000 undergrads.

Unfortunately, homecoming at Boston U. is not a big deal at all. The parade never gets more than a few spectators, and there's a lot of apathy to the whole thing. A lot of the reason is a lack of a football team, as well as a lack of general school spirit overall. The Greek System puts together a float, which usually comes out really nice, and there's the added bonus of having the Greek system working together; too bad no one really comes out to see it.

Collin

Different
 

I go to a small school in the middle of cornfields of the midwest. a total student population of 1200, the Knox College homecomming is somewhat small, and really only a big deal for greeks.

We have a homecomming football game. before/during/after the game, each of the 5 houses do something for their alums. We (Sigma Nu)put up a tent outside, BBQ some food, and have refreshments waiting, as a pregame snack. 2 of the other fraternities do something similer. The sororities have "tea" time or a snack meeting type of thing in their houses, and a couple of the fraternities hold events in their houses.

After the game, there are class reunion meetings, and such things, and in our house, we have a housing core meeting, and a general meeting of Brothers and Alums. Afterwhich we spend the evening going to dinner with some of the alums, and hold a small informal, closed party for those who wish to stay(normaly ending up to be the newer alums, from the last couple of years). It is usualy a great time, but for the non-greeks, there isn't anything for them to do. And many of them don't really know what goes on. Some of the sports teams on my campus have their own homecomming dates for some odd reason.

M.
Sigma Nu
Knox College.

Homecoming was banned at my school. It got too out of hand last year and they banned it. The only thing is it wasn't the students causing problems but outside people. Which the students got blamed for. Homecoming was a huge deal but now we have an underground homecoming. It is really amazing to see people partying at 8 am in the morning. Kegs and eggs is a popular party. The only thing is the students do not attend the game as much as what the school would like. So the college frowns upon that a lot. We will most likely not have another homecoming for a while. Another point is we have an awesome football team and we win are division every year but we can never move out of that division because my college doesn't not give out scholarships for football and so we cannot more into the scholarship divsions. So the students really don't have to cheer for the team because we know they will win the division like they do every year. How boring we want a game that we can get into not a game when we beat the team 72 to 6. Its just not fun anymore. I'm not kidding about that score too. :p

Our homecoming is ALWAYS really fun. Each student organization, including greeks, residence halls, clubs, student government, etc., nominate a king and a queen. They do three rounds of voting, and the king and queen are decided from the top five of all that voting. All nominees may ride in the parade though, in a convertible with a sash and such. Very cute :)

Then, any student organization can enter a float in the parade. Usually, this is a Greek Thing, but in recent years, more groups have been doing it. Since we have 9 sororities and 11 fraternities, what ends up happening is 2 sororities and 2 fraternities or such will all join together in a four pack and do the float. That way the cost is spread out amongst all four groups. We usually get the truck part donated, because we know a guy who has this. Then, it's a matter of fluffing flowers, spraypainting, and building. We usually end up doing it the night before, because we procrastinate, but it's still really fun. They give out first, second and third places to the floats, and then the Greeks vote on their favorite amongst themselves.

We also do window decorating at the residence halls, a banner contest, where all organizations paint a banner for up at the stadium and of course, it's alumnae weekend for the Fall. So tons of alums come up and it's just great :)

Homecoming
 

The Student Government Association and the IFC(for GLOs) will usually give money to registered organizations to help them pay for their float. The float contest is open to any registered organization. There's usually a spending limit for participants that wish to have their floats judged for contest. This makes sure that some people don't go to overboard and blow everyone else out. The judging takes place the night before the parade. Judges will go to each different house and rate the floats. A good way to get money and help, and what a lot of people do, is to find a sponsor. It could be a local nightclub, a business, or whatever and just as long as you promote their business along with your letters or organization name it's cool. We usually have a Bonfire that week also. At this event groups and lots of Greeks, come up with chats, routines, screams, songs, whatever and compete for trophys. In addition to that there's a yell like hell competition. The nominations for king and queen are submitted to SGA and the running nominates attend the bonfire. All the while, about 2 weeks before, ballots open up at the student union and people of the student body are allowed to vote for their couple. The king and queen and the royal court are then announced at the bonfire. We had a really cool time doing all this even though mother nature sabotaged our float the night before the parade(We all pulled allnighters and had it good as new for the parade) and made life hell. In addition to that, we had an activity scheduled that night so immediately after the activity, our soaking sorry #$%*&&^% made it back at 2:00a.m. and started working. During the running period we all made signs and posted them all over campus with "Vote for....". There were even rules for this. We couldn't post a sign 60 ft. from the union and they had to be a certain sign to be legal and uniform. I hope some of this helps. Fraternally, Mystic Cat32

Just Bumping this back up ;)

Thank you to everyone who has posted! Does anyone have more info? How EXACTLY do you make a Lawn Display and a Float? Thanks! :D