 "Photo: Nicole Aizaga")
Amongst the school spirit and excitement of homecoming week, the RSO Olympics took place last week and engaged student clubs in a competition for money and bragging rights.
The DE Angler Association won the games. Junior Alex Aten, press secretary for the club, said he is happy his club won the competition.
“It feels really good to win, I’m very proud of the club,” Aten said.
The RSO Olympics is a week-long competition among the various student organizations on campus held in conjunction with Homecoming.
The banner and spirit competitions have been going on for over a decade, but this is the first year that they are a part of the larger RSO Olympics, Laura McGrath, a graduate assistant in the student centers office, said.
“It’s a way for the RSOs to get a little competitive,” McGrath said. “And it gets people ready for Homecoming and shows UD spirit.”
The olympics consisted of four separate events, she said. There was a campus trivia search on Wednesday, won by the UD Angler Association. The contest involved following text message clues to certain areas around campus and taking pictures.
On Thursday, the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship won the 5-on-5 flag football tournament.
On Friday the banner and spirit competition took place. In this competition, each RSO had to create a Homecoming banner that incorporated the JMU Duke Dog mascot, McGrath said. The banners were judged while they were on display in the Trabant University Center last week.
The banners were judged on creativity, school spirit, originality and appropriate representation of the university, she said. The Spirit portion of this competition involved putting on a skit or song that shows school spirit and gets the crowd excited for Homecoming.
The Student Centers Programming Advisory board, SCPAB, won the banner and spirit competition this year and led the football team out onto the field Homecoming day.
Chelsea Berdolt, secretary of the club, said they had been working on their banner and song for two weeks. The club put a lot of effort into this competition, she said.
“It was an awesome experience to win” Berdolt said. “It was so cool to see all the stands filled. Everyone was so happy.”
SCPAB’s banner had a Halloween theme, she said. YouDee was portrayed as a ghost and had the message “Spook the Duke” written across it. For the spirit competition, they did a song and dance to the theme from Ghostbusters.
For each individual competition win, a RSO received $100. The overall winner of the Olympics will receive $300, 2nd place $200, 3rd place $100, and 4th place will receive $50, McGrath said.
However, only the winners of the banner and spirit competition get to lead the football team out on to the field homecoming day, she said.
This is an added prize, because Greek organizations compete in the banner and spirit competition but not the larger RSO Olympics, McGrath said. It has also been a long standing tradition of at least ten years.
The DE Anglers Association is one of the newer clubs that is competing in the RSO Olympics.
The group won the campus trivia search and came in second for the flag football tournament, and the banner and spirit competition.
Aten attributed the trivia search win to the fact that the club has several tour guides on their team.
This is the club’s second year on campus and they are excited to compete in the olympics to get their name out and earn some money for their club, he said.
Their banner featured YoUDee and the JMU Duke Dog mascot in a fishing competition. In the banner YoUDee caught a huge fish, and the duke dog only got a tiny one.
“We weren’t too worried about the competition,” Aten said referring to the fact that the DE Anglers Association is a small organization going up against large RSOs, such as the Student Government Association and SCPAB. “It might be a little easier for the larger RSOs to organize,” he said. “But we don’t feel we’re at too much of a disadvantage.”
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