Heritage Residence building Rogers took home the Union Cup trophy in their first win of the year on Sunday, Feb. 13 in the Bowld Student Commons.
After a fall semester filled with Union Cup events hosted by Residence Life such as Chomped, the Half-K and Find the Cup, the finale was highly anticipated by all competitors, including Rogers.
“We have been preparing from the beginning,” two-year Rogers RA Anna Thompson said. “Before every event, we paint ‘Roger Rogers on our limbs, we listen to hype music, we do our chant and just get excited for things.”
The finale took place earlier in the spring semester than it has in previous years.
“In the past, we’ve done it where the finale was at the end, and we were like, ‘Okay, we won it, time to take finals and leave,’” Resident Director Isaac Elliot said. He said that moving the finale gives the winners “a whole semester to be with her girls and to be able to have bragging rights.”
During the final event, the buildings participated in several challenges. These included paintings of Union President Samuel W. “Dub” Oliver and Union mascot Buster, catching gummy bears thrown from the second floor of the Bowld gym and a trivia round with competitors’ feet submerged in ice water.
After an elimination round halfway through the event, Rogers was one of five buildings that moved on to the next phase, which consisted of four challenges with each challenge eliminating one building.
The finale itself was not open to all buildings, as it has been in past years. Instead, only by winning a fall Union Cup event could a building secure its chance at the cup itself.
“I think if we give an automatic bid into the final, instead of making it a free-for-all at the end, that would incentivize coming to events—winning events,” Elliot said.
Because Heritage building Lee won two events, the RDs determined that Lee could use one of their wins to invite another building along who had not qualified for the final event.
“It mixed it up a little bit and gave people opportunities who may have not had opportunities in the past,” Elliot said.
Rogers convinced the Lee RA to choose their building to join the competition by offering her refreshments and giving her a presentation on why they should be invited.
“No other building, to my knowledge, even attempted to ask them,” Thompson said. “So I think that made a really big impact—that we put in the effort to actually give them reasons why they should bring us to the final.”
When asked what one of those reasons was, Thompson said that their main argument was that Rogers would not win.
“We had lost every single event up to that point,” Thompson said. “We had just continually failed and failed and failed and failed, and sometimes pretty miserably.”
Despite their repeated losses, Rogers managed to outperform every other building during the final on Sunday, winning the Union Cup.
Thompson said that over the past year, the Union Cup events have brought her building together.
“It’s truly incredible to see how people will bond, and who would have never interacted with each other, who would have never had the chance to get together, but who do because it’s all for the sake of Rogers,” Thompson said.
