8:30am. Tuesday morning. Marketplace Dining Hall. Eggs, bacon, potatoes, OJ, fruit, open-space meetings, elections, athletics and school spirit.

Five folks, including the two of us, and everyone was enthusiastic about getting involved in the discussion. Ideas were flying from each of us, which was our hope. We initially talked about the campus elections but that backfired because I (Armistead) had to remain impartial and nonpartisan instead of contributing. We had much more success with our dominant topic. The conversation centered around the problem of attracting more students to athletic events and the more general concept of fostering school spirit.

A sampling of the ideas:

• schedule games on weekends at a consistent, regular time


• involve and excite student groups (organizations, frats, sororities, etc) to get involved as a mass of people to 'sponsor' a particular team or player, which encourages that group to come to the games consistently and to spread that excitement


• build a culture/hype around the big afternoon events (such as football, basketball), including dressing up (suit, tie, sundress) for games


• build other events around the sport events (no conflict in scheduling, plan a whole weekend afternoon/evening including the sport)


• introduce new concepts of school spirit that are attractive in different ways than what students normally consider spirit

Perhaps this topic will continue after spring break. We will probably have higher attendance next time too. We hit on some other points that could take off soon, such as successful and not-so-successful campus campaigning/advertising/marketing.

DTT and Tribe Pride: get some!

-Alex and Armistead