With PennWest California’s “This is Caloween Town” themed homecoming parade quickly approaching, fraternities and sororities are hard at work assembling their floats as part of a yearly tradition.
On Oct. 18, starting at noon, grouped sororities and fraternities will showcase their floats in the parade starting on campus and continuing down 3rd Street with students, alumni, and even surrounding community members in attendance.
The groups for this year’s homecoming are: Alpha Sigma Alpha and Alpha Kappa Lambda, Delta Zeta and Acacia, Sigma Kappa and Phi Gamma Delta, and finally Phi Sigma Sigma, Alpha Sigma Tau, and Sigma Tau Gamma.
Competing for Greek Week points as well as a prize of $100, which occurs in the Spring semester, these groups spend a considerable amount of time on their floats: planning, assembling, then decorating.
A group of judges made up of faculty, staff, and community members will be sitting on the steps of Manderino Library, where groups will have the chance to show off their float with a moving part while stopped for 90 seconds in front of the judges.
According to Kennedy Miller, senior communications major and president of the Delta Zeta chapter, during Greek Week in the Spring, sororities will ask fraternities to pair up, often doing so with a poster board.
Diane Hasbrouck, Associate Director of Student Development and Engagement, emphasized that the teamwork experience involved with building floats is a way to build and strengthen connections between organizations.
“Any opportunity that Greek organizations can work together helps build our Greek unity on campus,” Hasbrouck said. “I think it shows how connected we all are and how supportive everyone is.”
Miller finds merit in pairing with other organizations and pointed out that Delta Zeta and Acacia have been pairing up for different events for a few years.
“It’s really good networking,” Miller said. “It strengthens our relationships as chapters and organizations, but also individually, I think it gives a lot of our girls an opportunity to really talk to these guys outside of school.”
A lot of planning goes into these floats once groups are paired up; this starts at the end of the Spring semester and requires many of these organizations to establish a position for a homecoming chair to take on the extra work.
Bella Robaugh, elementary education major and President and Homecoming Chair of the Phi Sigma Sigma chapter, expressed that everything homecoming-related is really a team effort within groups.
“We had to have a plan A and plan B for Diane, so I just made two and gave them to the homecoming chairs of Sig Tau and AST and had them choose from there,” Robaugh said. “We kind of do it the same way with homecoming t-shirts.”
As the Fall semester progresses, groups are then able to begin their floats once they obtain all the necessary items like a trailer, lumber, chicken wire, nails, and tools.
While each group schedules float building in different ways and has certain hour requirements, both building and pomping are lengthy processes and take up to a couple of weeks to complete.
Brandon Hebda, junior communications major and President of Acacia, stressed that managing their time is a very important aspect to make sure everything is in place to be able to move on to pomping.
“It’s an all-hands-on-deck kind of thing, so it’s just an assumed thing that if you’re a brother of Acacia and you’re not doing anything, get up to the house, we are grinding out the float,” Hebda said.
Both Delta Zeta and Sigma Kappa require sisters to put in a certain number of hours to be able to walk in the parade, but also understand that some girls have jobs and classes that may interfere with these hours.
The day before the parade, groups must take their floats to a designated spot to prepare for lineup the next morning. Members then typically arrive a couple of hours before walking to put finishing touches on their floats and fix up anything that may have fallen off due to rain, wind, or transporting the float.
“I hope that it doesn’t rain,” Robaugh said. “We’re so nervous about it raining; it’s always our bad luck during homecoming, it always rains.”
Once the parade is over, groups make their way to the dumpster at the end of the river lot to take apart and throw away floats, and guidelines actually state that no parts of the floats are to be kept after homecoming and must be disposed of properly.
To ensure homecoming is enjoyable for all and does not litter the roads with float materials, sororities and fraternities do a town cleanup before and after the parade.
“We do a post-homecoming cleanup where we really target those areas where the floats were, so wherever they were building to the campus lot that they are staged in, the parade route, and then where they dispose of it,” Hasbrouck said. “So we make sure we go through and clean that all the next morning.”
Homecoming is an exciting time for all the organizations on campus, as well as the community members who get to participate.
“I feel like all Greeks wait for Fall because it’s homecoming and we’re all focused and excited to build our floats, so it’s a lot of fun seeing how everyone goes the extra mile,” Hebda said. “It’s a lot of work, but it’s all worth it.”
For a lot of organizations, this is a way to build relationships and branch out to talk to others they may have otherwise never interacted with.
“I’m excited to see everybody else’s floats, it’s always a good time,” Miller said. “It’s super fun, a lot of late nights and a lot of good laughs.”
