Homecoming: on the verge of a sad death

The year was 1951. Women had been banned from Cal Poly for the past 12 years due to budget cuts and it would be five more years before they were re-admitted. But it was also the year that 21-year-old Nancy Schlegel, an El Corral Bookstore employee and the wife of a Cal Poly student, was crowned Cal Poly’s first Homecoming queen. She said she was honored to be the first and hoped she wouldn’t be the last.

More than 50 Homecomings later, this tradition is dead and no one seems to notice, or care, for that matter.

Last year, Homecoming came and went and it seemed as though no one even batted an eyelash that a piece of Homecoming history had vanished. There was no recognition of 10 notable male and female students during halftime and there were no Cal Poly floats carrying proud students along the streets of downtown.

This year will mark the second year that the Homecoming court and parade, as well as a slew of other activities, are absent from the event.

The reasons for the downfall of Homecoming can’t be pinpointed exactly and no one person is to blame, but things started getting messy after the 2005 Homecoming. Poly graduate Matt Sorgenfrei, a former Poly Rep and the 2005 Homecoming king, saw the program change hands from the Alumni Association to Student Life and Leadership when the association said they couldn’t coordinate the event anymore given all the other Homecoming duties to be done. But he said what really brought the walls crashing down on Homecoming was the decision by Associated Students Inc. (ASI) to deny the program the funding it needed in order to exist. Without the sufficient funding, Homecoming was doomed.

The lack of funding wasn’t the only factor, though, as a lack of student involvement was just as much to blame – no one was interested in keeping the event alive anymore.

Even Elise Buckley (now a married Poly graduate) noticed the lack of interest in the event as a member of the committee that selected the court and organized the parade in 2004 and 2005.

“It was never a big deal and it wasn’t particularly popular,” she said, adding that it was primarily the Poly Reps and her sorority, Kappa Alpha Theta, that worked to keep the traditions alive, along with some help from the Mustang Band.

In fact, if you were to look at a list of Homecoming events from five years ago, you wouldn’t even think it was for the same event if it wasn’t for the football game. In 2002, there were events every day for students, including the 17th annual Laugh Olympics (a bizarre event in which students competed in games like Mount Your Mackerel, where teams would slap each other with fish while piggybacking), the Mock Rock lip-synch contest and a Powder Puff football game.

Today, all we are left with is a handful of events geared toward alumni. Whether there will even be a rally is unclear.

Maybe Homecoming is too “high school” for 18,500 college students, and maybe the idea is still too much of a popularity contest. But one thing is for sure: Cal Poly traditions have been dropping like flies lately. By the look of things, Homecoming is about to get flushed down the toilet just as Mardi Gras and Poly Royal did.

But just imagine what it could be. What better event to honor students who really mean something to this university? Instead of just members of the greek community, Poly Reps and the band, students from ASI, Spectrum and hundreds of other clubs should also be recognized for their everyday service to this university.

Cal Poly students are incredibly fickle when it comes to school spirit. It’s there, there’s no doubt about that. You see it in the Week of Welcome program and at this season’s football games, and Sorgenfrei pointed out that Cal Poly students especially take an enormous amount of pride in their college and major.

This doesn’t have to be a tradition that fizzles away slowly – it just requires a group of students who actually care about preserving it.

As for the Homecoming crown? It currently resides in Sorgenfrei’s closet in his parents’ house in Palo Alto.

“Maybe someday they will call and ask for it back,” he said.