As student groups prepare for the annual Homecoming parade, the planning committee made some changes to make everything flow easier for everyone, according to Katie Parker, a senior in communications and parade chair.
Parker said the biggest change to the parade, which will be from 6 to 7 p.m. Friday, will be in the route that the parade follows.
“We’ve changed the parade route so that it doesn’t close down Sullivan Drive,” she said. “Pullen [Road] and Cates [Avenue] will be closed. Dan Allen [Drive] will be closed, but only as far as Cates.”
Parker also said that she hopes the weather doesn’t intervene in the homecoming plans.
“Last year the parade got rained out,” she said. “It’s supposed to be sunny all weekend so we’re hoping that everything goes well.”
Jeff Butler, a junior in political science and secretary of Pi Kappa Alpha, said his team designed their float based on the entire homecoming theme. Pi Kappa Alpha was one of the many student groups that designed and built a float for the parade.
“We paired up with a sorority and finished building a float and made signs to go around it,” Butler said. “It’s taken about a week to finish.”
Student Wolfpack Club, who won third in the float competition last year, hopes they can take everything they learned in last year’s competition and build a float that will win them first place, according to Amanda Wujcik, a junior in sports management and board member of Student Wolfpack Club.
“I have a lot of experience working on floats from student council in high school,” Wujcik said. “I’m an artistic person and my roommates helped me come up with awesome ideas for the floats. We tossed up a bunch of ideas and we finally came to the conclusion that we wanted to build a tank because the homecoming theme was military based. We found out another group was building a tank so we knew the competition was going to be tough.”
Matt Benson, a senior in industrial engineering and president of Student Wolfpack Club said he wanted to keep things more organized than previous years and hoped that his team could design a winning float.
“We were a lot more organized with things this year,” Benson said. “We planned things ahead of time and made sure our ducks were in a row. We finished third last year so we had some idea of what worked and what didn’t and we went from there.”
Several members of Wujcik’s group had conflicting schedules which made it very hard for them to get together to work on the project. Wujcik said she believes her group’s float has a great chance of winning, despite having started later than she had hoped.
“We had to step our game up and get our heads together,” she said. “It was a disappointment that more people couldn’t come out and help. We pulled bits and pieces of the theme that was given and tied it all together with football. I want to see the biggest student organization win more than anything.”
Other than route changes, nothing major has changed with the parade.
“We’ve had a slight change in lineup, but it’s nothing big,” Parker said. “There are going to be a lot of V.I.P. people there, including the football captains, some of the men’s basketball players, and the women’s basketball team. We definitely have a great lineup.”
