Photo by Mykah Heaton Ouderkirk
UVU organized the second year of Midnight Madness, a 24-hour event promoting the home-opener for the men’s basketball team. Mountain Dew pong, dodge ball competitions and raffle drawings were among the different type of activities offered to students.
Events such as the Midnight Madness help create a pride among students at UVU, according to Neal Peterson, vice-president of traditions on campus.
“We want to get students more engaged and involved within UVU. They can attend events like this. They are going to have more fun, and it creates more of a sense of pride for UVU,” said Peterson.
The UVU Student Alumni and the UVU Athletic department combined their efforts to organize the event.
Kameron Dearing, director of Marketing for Athletics, said he understands the challenge that the school faces to create culture among its students since it is a commuter college, but hopes that events such as Midnight Madness can help create school pride and culture among UVU students.
Mark Pope, coach of the men’s basketball team said, “I am convinced we can grow this into a great college atmosphere, and give our students a great experience, and that’s what we are trying to do.”
Pope said his favorite thing about UVU is how the diverse body of students range from different age groups and backgrounds, and how the growing-campus community makes it an exciting time for students.
Camery Victor, a junior at UVU, said events like Midnight Madness are good opportunities to make friends, as well as to enhance school spirit.
“I think UVU needs to have more school spirit. We are a really big university, and we need to have school spirit because it’s our school,” said Victor. “We should support it, come together and take pride in our school, and I think events like this make it fun.”
Victor also said she was going to try to stay-up all night at the event and commit to the 24-hour madness.
The event also featured performances from the UVU dance team, the UVU Hip-Hop group and the Green-Man group, a drumline band.
I guess the reason why UVU doesn’t have school spirit is because to most It doesn’t feel like a real university. Especially in it’s design, comparing to other universities, architecturally it still feels like a community college. For some reason there’s a music class in the computer tech building and an english class in the automotive floor. It all feels off.
UVUSA tires way too hard to implement school pride. We get pride off of our achievements not by creating fun activities.
Why not spread the activities to the other buildings and not just the LA and Ballroom? Why can’t the business department host a wolverine Wednesday and they provide food in their building? or the computer tech building could have an activity and offer food as well? I just feel that we neglect many buildings and departments.
I’d have to disagree about it not feeling like a real university. The enrollment has increased so there are more freshmen needing to take GEs like English and basic math and sometimes putting them clear up next to auto shop is needed. However, I think the new classroom building should be helping. But the highest flow of students is in the ballroom and LA building, so it wouldn’t make sense to promote activities in low traffic areas of the school like the business and computer tech. The school pride thing is an issue but when the school really tries to promote something to the students there’s actually a really good turnout and it helps us win and winning is the only thing that will give students pride in their school. That home opener for basketball this year was pretty sweet with all the students and families. The first two years of soccer were really good turnouts as well and the school was constantly promoting it but I’m not sure what happened this year, from watching on tv the home game turnouts were really low in the second half of the season and I can only assume that the school wasn’t promoting it as well as it did the first two years. I think a higher turnout would have helped beat UNLV and sent UVU to the big dance but.. maybe next year.