In case you missed it, and I’m sure that a lot of you did, this past weekend Boston University held its annual homecoming festivities.
What a joke.
For most schools, the highlight of Homecoming Weekend is the football game. But of course, BU isn’t most schools; the fact that we don’t have a football team prevents this from even being possible. Instead, the organizers center Homecoming Weekend around the Head of the Charles Regatta.
This isn’t necessarily the worst decision that could be made. The regatta is one of the largest in the world and draws rowers and spectators from all over the state, country and world. Packed with rowers on the water and fans on the bridges and banks, the Head of the Charles is truly a spectacle.
The problem is that the regatta is not a Boston University event. Sure, our rowers compete and the participants row though our campus, but this is not an event that centers around BU it’s a Cambridge event more than it is a Boston event.
The Head of the Charles isn’t the only event going on during Homecoming Weekend there are lots of other things happening, including float-building and a parade of these floats the following day. It’s at the parade down Commonwealth Avenue that we get our annual glimpse at the BU marching band. I wonder how many people were scratching their heads on Saturday as they thought, ‘We have a marching band?’
Without a football game, BU’s Homecoming floats and parade are little more than an annoyance for Saturday morning traffic.
One of the biggest problems with Homecoming Weekend this year was the lack of home games for our teams. The only teams to play at home this weekend were the women’s soccer and field hockey teams. For a weekend that is supposed to showcase Boston University, wouldn’t it at least make sense to schedule home games?
Homecoming doesn’t have to be a joke though. While BU doesn’t have a football team to center Homecoming around, there are a number of Terrier teams to pick up the slack. Why not center Homecoming around BU sports as a whole?
BU Basketball’s Midnight Mayhem offers the perfect start to Homecoming Weekend. For some reason though, it’s not nearly the event that Ice Hockey Midnight Mania is.
That’s unfortunate, because it’s an event that showcases two of the best teams BU has to offer. Even though basketball isn’t the hottest ticket on campus, students would be drawn to an event where they would have fun. So why not go out and make it the spectacle that it can be? If Midnight Mayhem is made into the event that it is at other schools, it wouldn’t just be the basketball teams that would reap the benefits; it would also be a great way to kick-start Homecoming Weekend.
People have a lot of fun building floats, and put a lot of time into making them as well. So why not give them a bigger role in Homecoming than a meaningless trip down Commonwealth Avenue? The Homecoming parade shouldn’t end with the destruction of the floats at Harry Agganis Way, but continue on, led by the marching band, onto Nickerson Field. This would be the perfect place to hold a large pep rally of sorts for all Terrier athletes. Sure, you might think that pep rallies are dumb and ‘way too high school,’ but other schools do this type of thing for their homecoming weekends.
To entice fans to attend, a pep rally would need more than just floats, a marching band and athletes. Food would be key to accomplish this nothing attracts college students more than free food. And prizes too, because college students love free stuff. To top it all off, maybe even get Jim Prior on the PA system for the event.
The key to the entire weekend though should be the home games. If the men’s and women’s soccer teams as well as the field hockey team had homes games, students and alumni would have their choice of events to attend. Of course, it’s true that students don’t generally attend these games in the first place, but if Homecoming was a sports-themed weekend, and there was a pep rally before these games, at least a few more people may be encouraged to attend.
The biggest mistake of Homecoming this year was the lack of a home hockey game. For the Icedogs to be playing in Vermont during Homecoming is absurd. Hockey at BU is just as big as football at many other schools, which is why a Terrier home game is the perfect event for Homecoming Weekend. The Icedogs taking the ice would be the culmination of the day’s buildup, and the perfect opportunity for fans to show school spirit.
In my opinion, Homecoming is an event that students should be anxious for all year. It should be an event that alumni want to come back to Boston University to be a part of. In its current state, that’s just not the case. At the moment, BU has no homecoming tradition to entice students or alumni.
All traditions start somewhere though, and it’s not too late to begin one now.
Joe Rouse, a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences, is a weekly sports columnist for The Daily Free Press.