“I hope it fosters something that’s longer term. We can’t sustain something like Homecoming every week, but we get a taste of how fun it is to be together as a school rooting for something.”
Kara Drotar, a senior business administration major, serves as the Student Government Association’s (SGA) Chief of Staff, which puts her right at the center of one of Union’s most significant weeks in the entire school year: Homecoming. In fact, it is such a vital part of her role that most people simply refer to her as the Homecoming Director.
Homecoming is the week when the heart of Union’s student life is perhaps most visible. A variety of events bring students together throughout the week, something Drotar and everyone else involved in the planning of Homecoming hoped would foster a campus-wide spirit of school pride.
“I know as students, [homecoming] means a time that we’re celebrating our university, but we’re also just having a week where we’re coming together around a lot of events, building a lot of community for that,” Drotar said. “It’s kinda like, as students, we need excuses to get together, which I guess is just human, that we don’t just hang out all the time.”
In addition to SGA, the Office of Student Discipleship and Engagement played an instrumental role in planning Homecoming. Joe Ball, the office’s executive director, felt similarly to Drotar. In fact, school spirit was so central to the vision of Homecoming this year that it unified the different organizations involved in its planning.
“Our theme this year is called Forever Bulldogs. So we want to create school pride and an opportunity to have fun events and spend time together,” Ball said. “Union is unique because our homecoming — a lot of colleges will focus on their alumni for homecoming — our primary focus is actually on current students.”
Here, an interesting element to the week becomes relevant: though the week was planned to center on school pride, competition within the student body was woven into various events throughout Homecoming. By and large, it gave shape to it. The week culminated with the awarding of the Homecoming trophy, which was given to the student organization that had scored the most points. These points were earned in two ways: performance in smaller competitions (like banner painting and an athletic competition called Bulldog Olympics) and having the highest percentage of organization members attend various events.
Union exemplifies something that is true of all colleges and, really, humanity itself: we can’t help but form in-groups and out-groups — even within larger ones. In his essay The Inner Ring, C.S. Lewis conceived of society as a series of concentric rings. Each ring within a ring represents a more exclusive and desirable group and, if you’re not careful, you’ll end up always wanting to be in the next inner ring. Union is a large ring with many smaller ones within it. Truth be told, I am in one of the organizations that participated in Homecoming and I went to events, in part, because I wanted my organization to win. Ball, however, viewed this kind of phenomenon as inevitable.
“If we didn’t have organizations, there would be groups of people who would group together for these things. A lot of times we think about these organizations as things that kind of separate us, but that’s just natural,” Ball said. “Union has roughly 90 student organizations on campus. I can’t imagine having one student organization.”
Ball recognized it is unrealistic to imagine Union functioning as one larger group without breaking off into smaller ones. Even in the absence of organizations, students would still split off from one another. Everyone would still find their people, because you can’t be close with an entire campus — and you’d drive yourself into exhaustion if you tried.
Olivia Wyatt, a senior public relations major, knows what it is to find a home within the larger context of Union. As the President of Kappa Delta, one of Union’s three sororities, she was responsible for rallying her organization throughout Homecoming and getting them to show up for competitions.
“I’m hoping, ultimately at the end, for unity within my chapter, but also to create the spirit that Greek Life, as a whole, is not separate from Union,” Wyatt said. “Because I feel like a lot of people get this idea in their head that Greek Life should be separate from Union when Homecoming is supposed to be going toward unity as a whole. So I hope that they, in the end, do still feel pride for their own separate organizations, because you still need that as a good balance, but then also take away from it that we can all coexist.”
Why, though, should we compete during Homecoming? Even if it’s natural for a campus to break off into smaller groups, how does interlacing competition into a week about unity help us? The simple, and probably too easy, narrative is to pit competition and unity as being at odds with one another. Drotar, in charge of running the points system, saw a different relationship between the two and compared it to her family’s experience.
“You’re competing against them, but that doesn’t undermine the fact that you’re spending that time with them. When I’m hanging out with my family, at holidays and stuff, we’re always doing some kind of competition,” Drotar said. “We always do a cribbage tournament, my mom and I like to do puzzles and we’ll race to do them. So, we’re competing against each other but it just gives us a space to spend time with each other.”
Competition is not the enemy of unity. Maybe, in the right environment, it invites it.
Competition involves many of the key ingredients of bonding: proximity, a shared goal and shared experience. Ball believed that competition can be more about what it provides than whatever award lies at the end of it.
“I think that’s the thing. Homecoming is so much bigger than the Homecoming Cup and, quite frankly, most people won’t care on Sunday who won the Homecoming Cup on Saturday,” Ball said. “I bet if you polled the average student, most will have no idea who won it last year. I think the competition creates buy-in for more people to participate … So one of the things we’ve seen over the past few years is that the number of students participating in Homecoming events has grown. The reason why that’s happened is because we have more organizations participating in Homecoming.”
Ball also pointed out that many Homecoming events don’t have a competitive element. Songs and Stories allowed students to gather in the middle of the week to sing praise and worship and hear a sermon. At the Buster Bowl, two student teams were assembled and given the opportunity to participate in a football game in front of a crowd. These events were well attended even though no one was required to be there.
A few events, though, stand out to me in particular: Bulldog Madness and the men’s and women’s basketball games. Bulldog Madness was a pep rally in which, among other things, the men’s and women’s basketball players were introduced and given the chance to show off their skills. Then, the next day, we got to watch them play.
“I just loved pep rallies when I was younger,” Wyatt said. “Bulldog Madness just seems like another way to get to enjoy a pep rally. So like, getting to cheer, and be crazy and be loud and — it’s a good stress reliever too — you get to just stand and yell for 30 minutes.”
At Bulldog Madness, I felt the same way as Wyatt. Points were given to the organization with the most hype, incentivizing high energy from the students. At a certain point, though, I forgot I was cheering for points and was just cheering. That energy continued into the basketball games the next day.
If you want people to feel unashamed pride for their groups, put sports in front of them. Many people are most patriotic during the Olympics, most proud of their city when watching the home team and a lot of students in the crowd seemed more excited to be a Union student than ever while watching the Union Bulldogs play.
“I think one of the best places for school spirit to be shown is actually in supporting our athletes, our sports teams,” Ball said.
Ultimately, I think Homecoming met the goals of everyone who tirelessly worked to plan it, Drotar and Ball included. At each event, I started out the night hanging out with those I knew best (which does include many people in my organization), but I always ended up branching out and talking to someone I normally don’t, even those I was competing against.
It’s okay that I have my home base of people here, as we all do. Most of them are only in my life because of Union and the spaces, venues and events it provides. Union gave me that home base. It’s strange to think that there are people who will have been here for the same amount of time as me, but we never met, never joined any of the same organizations and never hung out with any of the same people. Yet, we all stood in the stands, interconnected by a messy web of overlapping lives, all cheering for our team. Homecoming united us — but for Drotar, responsible in so many ways for making it happen, it also allowed us to celebrate what we already have.
“Let’s just get together and have fun. It’s kind of like a holiday.”