Campus News

Homecoming events not affected by date change

Homecoming week events were not affected by the new dates, Oct. 30-Nov. 4. | Courtesy of Taylor Rouleau

When homecoming week changed dates due to the football game being rescheduled, the homecoming board had to make some last-minute updates to the locations of the week’s already-planned events, and information regarding several events has not been announced.

The homecoming game against East Carolina University was originally scheduled for Oct. 28, but it had to be swapped with the Nov. 4 game against the University of South Florida due to Hurricane Irma. The change caused homecoming week to be pushed back as well.

Vice Chair of the Homecoming Board Mayra Castillo said no events were canceled, but certain events had to be moved to different locations since those areas were already booked for the week.

“When we found out for a moment, we kind of freaked,” Castillo said. “Because it’s something that’s never really happened before, so we didn’t know necessarily how much this was going to affect us.”

Some of the dates are now switched around, and the homecoming board still has not released information about certain events, Castillo said. The concert usually takes place on Friday but will now be happening on Thursday night.

“We’re having to look for last-minute reservations when typically reservations are made months in advance,” Castillo said. “Therefore, it was a little bit of a struggle, but we managed to get a majority of our events pretty much rescheduled. “

President of the Student Program Board Ezequiel Mendez said that the concert was originally planned to be held at Cullen Performance Hall but will now take place at Lynn Eusan Park.

SPB has not released who will be the headliner for the concert, as it is still in process of contracting with the artist, Mendez said.

“Basically, moving the homecoming concert will not be too bad since we’re moving it outside at Lynn Eusan Park,” Mendez said. “Right now, we’re just checking to make sure the reservation can go through, but other than that, it’s not too hard of a process with the concert itself; it’s with the artist.”

Mendez said that the artist is available for the new dates and does not have a scheduling conflict. SPB hopes to release who the artist will be during the first two weeks of October, he said.

One of the more stressful parts about the date change was the reaction from alumni, Castillo said.

“There was a lot of backlash from alumni on social media that were like, ‘Oh, I scheduled a plane ticket, (and) I scheduled a hotel,’” Castillo said. “I guess they thought it was something we had decided, but it was about having to explain to people that this was something we hadn’t decided. t was something we had to do.”

Castillo said the alumni were more understanding when they discovered the reason why the dates had to change.

Homecoming Board Chair Taylor Rouleau said that the final schedule and event marketing should be released within the next week or two. The Homecoming Board updated the promo video via social media Friday.

As for events this year, Rouleau said homecoming will be replacing older events such as CoogLympics, Color Me Houston and Roll Bounce, with new events such as Way Back Wednesday, bed races and a trip to Houston.

“We have a lot of exciting new traditions we are trying to start for students, so we hope they come out, wear red and enjoy the celebration of our great University and the city of Houston,” Rouleau said.

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