It seemed like an ordinary homecoming. The students were merry, the streets were painted and the alumni out in force. Late Friday night, as the bonfire threw long shadows across the Quad, no one suspected that in the coming hours, TU would be left wondering about the truth of its homecoming competition. Ringmasters of our media circus Michaela Flonard and Renan Kuntz report. Last Saturday at the football game, after a week of Homecoming activities, the winners of the homecoming competition were announced as Delta Delta Delta Sorority and Kappa Alpha Fraternity. DDD and KA were one team, as sororities and fraternities pair up for Homecoming. On Monday night, however, it was revealed that Fisher South, originally placed in third, had actually won Homecoming. The dorm won first place in both the street painting and yard board competitions, while DDD and KA got second in both. Student Association President
Graphic by Sarah Power
Michael Mancini explained that those in charge of tallying the points “didn’t have everything added up” early Saturday morning, when the results were due. They were “both up late Friday night and had to come in early Saturday morning” to tally points, Mancini said. However, they were still missing the yard board scores. Although Mancini said, “In retrospect, I’m not sure announcing was the best decision,” he also felt that there “was really no way to make everyone happy” because “not announcing the winner would have
also angered some.” Homecoming scores come from points for attendance and the varying competitions street painting, yard boards and pie eating. The yard boards are graded by TU alumni, and the results were not in early enough for SA to add them to each organization’s total. The “call was to give (the announcers) the best guess,” said Mancini. Even without the yard board results, Fisher South should have been announced the winner. The Homecoming tally results, released Monday, show that DDD and KA had 23 points without their yard board score. Fisher South had 40 points without the score, because they attended one more event than DDD/KA and won street painting. If DDD and KA had won yard boards, worth 10 points, Fisher would have still remained the overall winner.
Fisher South dormitory, however, did not know the problem with the yard board results over the weekend. Throughout Homecoming week, the Senior Resident Assistant and Resident Director of the building had kept close count of attendance and had met all goals. With the results of the street painting, they knew “mathematically, (Fisher South) had a pretty good chance of placing top two or three,” said Lindsley Aycock, Fisher South’s Senior Resident Assistant. “At first, it was just kind of disappointing (that we got third),” Aycock said, because “we worked really hard, and we thought we’d placed better than that.” But then she and Resident Director Zane Hight began to wonder if “maybe something was miscalculated, maybe there was some kind of error in the amount of points” See The Big Slip, p. 4