Get on board with CCU traditions!
by Fabiano
Teal Tuesday is up and running on Coastal Carolina University's campus, and everyone agrees it's a great new tradition.
At the close of last semester, the Teal Tuesday Committee’s No. 1 priority was to put Teal Tuesday in full effect. To do this, the committee began by determining how many Teal Tuesdays there were in the 2012-2013 academic year. T-shirts were created and ordered, enough to hand out 25 T-shirts on every Teal Tuesday. In an effort to get campus departments involved, an email was sent to all faculty/staff inviting departments to “sponsor” a Teal Tuesday. A sponsorship commits the department to pay for 25 T-shirts on the Tuesday of its choice, join the Teal Tuesday team on Prince Lawn at noon to distribute them to the first 25 students wearing teal (their slogan has become “you gotta wear teal to get teal!”), and take photos of the winners to post on the Teal Tuesday webpage, http://www.coastal.edu/students/osal/tealtuesday/.
The response has been wonderful! The committee filled up the fall semester’s Tuesdays with department sponsors quickly. (A few Tuesdays remain available for the spring semester if departments want to get on board). Students have been tweeting about it (@TealTuesdayCCU) and even waiting on Prince Lawn each Tuesday morning, hoping to get a Teal Tuesday shirt. New students, faculty and staff are consistently wearing teal on Tuesdays, which fills us all with CCU pride. A special thank you to Tyger Glauser, assistant director of student activities and leadership and co-chair of the Traditions Committee; Kevin Olivett, assistant athletic director for marketing and promotions and Traditions Committee member; and to our Teal Tuesday Team, CCU students Kaitlin Page and Dillon Warner.
The CCU Fight Song
Do you know we have a CCU fight song? An initial concern of the Traditions Committee was that the CCU fight song was not widely recognized by students, faculty and staff. The committee decided to start with the new students. Meredith Kahl, Traditions Committee member and associate director of Student Activities, added the CCU Fight Song into the Orientation program, so that new students are exposed to it early and can learn it. For football season, the Fight Song lyrics were printed on 20,000 CCU cups and in 15,000 athletic programs. The lyrics are also shown on the video board at games so that fans can sing along with the music. Now no one has an excuse not to sing along.
The Freshman Class Photo
The newest tradition, getting the entire freshman class together at Welcome Week for a class photo, was a huge feat. But it was accomplished for the first time ever, and this will now be a Welcome Week tradition. The Welcome Week staff managed to gather more than 2,000 freshmen on the football field to spell out the word “CINO” (Coastal is Number One) for a photo taken by local professional photographer Gene Ho, who also attended Coastal. The committee hasn’t found a home for these photos yet, but the plan is that they will be matted and framed with the class year and displayed in a building or area on campus.
What is next for the Traditions Committee? I can’t give everything away, but I can tell you we have ideas for more teal (and I don’t mean on a T-shirt), more fight song (listen for a new updated recording next semester), more of the alma mater, and you never know what you may hear playing on the hour from the bell tower. So get ON BOARD because it takes EVERYONE, not just a committee, to make new Coastal traditions long lasting and ever present.
