Sarah Haug
Greek Sing was held this past weekend on Saturday, April 7th at the Tater Patch. The event is organized and ran each year by the Interfraternity Council in conjunction with the Panhellenic Council. The premise of Greek Sing is that all the Fraternities and Sororities on campus, who wish to participate, compete against each other for one Fraternity and one Sorority to ultimately be crowned the winner. Besides bragging rights, each respective winner gets to donate the money raised from the event to benefit their respective philanthropy.
Money is raised in various ways for the event, but it all begins with Penny Wars. Penny Wars was an event held earlier in the semester on February 15th inside the Havener atrium. Each house participating had a corresponding five gallon bucket that collected change throughout the event. All silver change counted as a negative point value and all pennies indicated the opposite (a positive point value), hence the name of the event being Penny Wars. It was desirable to have the most positive point value at the end of the challenge because the order in which the bands play and the song choice priority is determined by the order they placed in from Penny Wars. This year, the winning Sorority was Chi Omega and the winning Fraternity was Tau Kappa Epsilon.
On Saturday, the gates opened at 5:30 PM and the first band took the stage at 6:00 PM. This year, Tater Patch was under construction so the layout of the event was different than it had been in the past. Despite this change, the event still ran smoothly. All students were invited to the event with admission being a 22 ounce cup that could be bought in advance for $6 or at the door for $8. With the purchase of the cup, there was all you can drink water included in the price, along with soda refills that were available for $1 each and beer for $2. Pitchers of beer could also be purchased at the event starting at $6.
Each year there is a theme for Greek Sing that guides the song choice of the bands for the event. This year, the theme was One Hit Wonders. Spectators witnessed an array of songs ranging from Mississippi Queen by Mountain, which was released in 1970, all the way to Classic by MKTO, which was released much more recently in 2014.
There were four judges for the event this year; Anitra Rivera, John Gallagher, Alison Ayers, and Jason Northern. The judges scored off of four evenly weighted categories: stage presence, crowd participation, quality of vocals, and quality of instrumentation. Awards were presented around 11:30 PM and it was announced that this year’s winners of Greek Sing were Chi Omega out of the three Panhellenic Sororities on campus and Kappa Alpha Order out of the eleven Fraternities that chose to participate in the event.
As mentioned before the event raised money from Penny Wars, money also came from cup, shirt, and drink sales. From Penny Wars, $1,200 was donated to the winning Sorority’s philanthropy of choice, and $1,100 was raised to go to the winning Fraternity’s philanthropy from the event. Chi Omega was benefiting the Make a Wish Foundation and Kappa Alpha Order was benefiting the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Overall, the event was a success. Even with enduring the blustery cold, the atmosphere, surrounded with friends having the opportunity to enjoy the musical talent of their peers, was charged with excitement - reflective of the eagerness to give back to a good cause.
