This past Saturday marked the first pregame tailgate of the Bears’ football season. Around 200 students congregated outside of the Danforth University Center, where they could buy traditional tailgating cuisine and compete for a few prizes before the football game against Wittenberg University.

Sophomore Jacqui Germain created the Facebook group “Football Games at WashU?!” in April 2009, after being disappointed with the lack of attendance and school spirit at football games and other sporting events. The group now contains almost 500 members.

“I started the group at the end of last year. I’ve been telling people to come to the games and trying to get people to get dressed up in school colors and paint their faces and just have fun,” Germain said. “I want people to support the team regardless of whether we are undefeated or whether they were struggling. It would be nice for the team to have the support.”

Germain points to her experiences growing up in Ohio and going to a high school with high team spirit.

“Everyone watched the Friday night football games at my high school,” she said. “When I came here, I knew it wasn’t going to be as much of a focus in the student body. But when I went to the first game, it was kind of sad to see that there weren’t really any students in the stands and that no one was wearing any school colors.”

Germain said she knew the football team would appreciate more fans and support. To remedy the low fan base at games, Germain decided to take on the initiative of assembling students who have an interest in attending the games.

The University administration and Student Union soon got behind the idea. Supporters used the parking lot outside the DUC and Francis Field to tailgate.

Various campus entities, including SU, Greek Life and the DUC, came together to organize the tailgate event. Leslie Heusted, director of the DUC, said she thinks tailgating before games at the DUC is a logical step toward raising school spirit and attendance at sporting events.

“I think the first thought process from my point of view is that we are adjacent to the field, so it makes sense that we would do something to help people gather before they go to the game,” Heusted said. “There’s a lot of interest in supporting school spirit and supporting the athletic teams from a lot of different student groups on campus, and it’s just a matter of finding space for that to happen.”

The first tailgate was successful in increasing school spirit at the game and for the football team, Heusted said.

“There was really good energy around the tailgating, and I think that can only help school spirit,” she said. “I think that any opportunity for people to come together and get excited together is a good opportunity to have. It’s a momentum that I hope we can build as we do this before each Saturday home game.”

Members of the football team were also appreciative of the efforts. Senior co-captain Andrew Berryman expects the tailgating to draw a new crowd to the games in addition to the current fans of the team.

“Tailgating gives students who may not know as much about football a reason to come out and see the game,” Berryman said. “It makes it seem like students are more excited about the team.”

For Berryman, the football team would benefit greatly from activities like tailgating that would promote the games.

“I feel that the student population isn’t well informed about games, so the advertising definitely helped,” he said. “It’s nice to have a lot of people thinking about the team.”

Germain said she has been making efforts to inform more students about when the games take place. She hopes attendance at the games will remain high throughout the year.

“The stands were full, which was pretty cool,” she said. “I don’t know if the stands will stay full, but more people now know the times of the games and when they’re going on.”

Wash. U. students have been competing against hundreds of students from New York University, Emory University, the University of Chicago, the University of Rochester, Case Western Reserve University, Carnegie Mellon University and Brandeis University in an online game of GoCrossCampus for control of the United States east of the Mississippi. This is the first time GoCrossCampus has pitted UAA schools against each other.

Anyone with a wustl.edu e-mail account can join the Bears’ army.

The online strategy game is like Risk in multiple ways. Commanders are elected from the ranks of a team, and these commanders create the battle plan and long-term strategy. The commanders also attempt to forge alliances with other teams.

Wash. U. is led by senior Antonio Rodriguez, sophomore Roger Alessi and sophomore Brett Yang.

“No one takes it too seriously,” Rodriguez said. “It’s just fun. This is a really cool way to represent Wash. U.”

Game turns last for 24 hours. At the end of each turn, orders are processed and teams receive bonus points for conquering territories and establishing an empire, with the final objective of the game being to eradicate the other teams and take every territory.

Wash. U. started off well with a large number of students, but Case Western Reserve has caught up. As of 3 p.m. on Thursday, 212 Wash. U. students and 355 Case Western players have signed up.

“We are definitely not out. If we get a lot of new players, it would really help,” Rodriguez said.

The site also offers a game chat, where students from various schools can share common problems that face college students, share jokes, fan rivalries or learn about other schools in the conference. There is also a team chat where players from the same school can interact.

“I play it because, especially being a commander, you get to talk to people from other schools that you would never talk with,” Rodriguez said. “It’s a community.”

“I’m a pretty competitive person, so I fully endorse rivalries, as long as it’s all in good fun,” sophomore Jennifer Varriano of the volleyball team said. “You can maintain a rivalry with another school outside of sports.”

As of turn 16 on Thursday afternoon, Wash. U. sits in fourth place with eight territories while Case Western Reserve is in first with 58 territories. New York University, Carnegie Mellon and Emory have already been eliminated.

All of the students interviewed emphasized the ease in getting involved.

“It takes only two minutes a day,” sophomore Michelle Lu said. “Sign in, click energize, move your energy and you’re done.”

When Varriano was asked if she would be willing to take on-court UAA rivalries to the Internet, she said, “Why not? It doesn’t look too difficult.”

Of course if you followed last week’s news of the odd, than you almost certainly know where I’m going with this. An offensive lineman at a Division II school chose football over a finger. Let me say that again: when told he needed season-ending surgery on his dislocated pinky, he told the doctors just to lop it off so that he could play. Now, before you pronounce final judgment on this guy, you should note two arguments that can be made in support of his choice. The first is that football’s been his life since he was playing Pop Warner, and now he’s a senior with just a couple of games left in his career. The second is that a person can survive without one little pinky.

Be that as it may, however, this is just the latest publicized account of athletes prioritizing sports over life. How often do we hear after the fact that someone took the field with a broken this or a torn that? More often than not, playing injured backfires and the quarterback throws four interceptions or the pitcher gives up eight runs. Yet the most shocking part about all this, at least to me, is that the injury often becomes the source of blame for the poor performance. Coaches are likely to say that someone didn’t have their “A” game because they were injured, instead of bringing up the fact that they shouldn’t have been playing at all. One would think the reason behind this is to avoid criticism for allowing an athlete to play injured, but this isn’t the case. In fact, I constantly hear the media rip athletes who don’t play as being “soft,” when any doctor would call it a basic concern for one’s well-being.

Yes, clichés like “chicks dig scars” and “pain is temporary, pride lasts forever” can be found a dime a dozen in our culture today, and it’s generally valid to argue that a professional athlete playing a little banged up is just like the office worker who goes in with a cold. But even for the toughest of the tough, there is a threshold beyond which the only option is calling in sick. If I’ve got a 102 fever, I stay in a day or two and get better. I don’t go to class, where I might only make my illness worse.

All of this seems like it should be common sense, but evidently to people like Trevor Wikre (of the amputated pinky), there are some things more important than a measly appendage. Who knows, maybe he’ll be able to milk all this publicity for enough TV appearances to let him live happily for the rest of his life. But what happens if he finishes his football career, maybe in the process even winning some awards or leading his team deep into the playoffs, only to find that perhaps he was a bit rash in getting rid of that finger, that having 10 fingers instead of nine might just have made the rest of his life a lot easier? Unlikely, yes, but it could happen.

Through the efforts of the Student Union (SU) executive board, SU Senator Mike Post and the Washington University Athletic Department, fans of the football team held a tailgate—where students barbecue, play music and prepare to root for their team—before the home opener to encourage school spirit.

The game, which was originally to be played at Greenville College, was rescheduled on short notice, prompting SU President Brittany Perez to plan the event in less than one week. Nonetheless, she claimed that 20 fans turned out before the game.

“We met to talk about how can we create a tailgating culture that maybe students could catch onto and make a tradition,” Perez said. Perez met with the Athletic Department earlier in the week to generate interest in tailgating at the University.

“A big thing about Wash. U. is that people wish there was more school spirit, and a great way to start that is through athletics,” Post said. “We need to make it an experience.”

The tailgate tradition has persisted perhaps since the birth of college football. For decades, legions of fans—mostly at major Division I universities—have shown up before games. Many fans of college football are even bigger fans of the pre-game tailgate.

“The thing I was pleasantly surprised about was how excited everyone was,” said Post, who hopes this weekend’s success will bring more people out to games for the rest of the season.

While the tailgate scene has so far eluded the University, Brittany Perez hopes this weekend’s event began a new tradition that will unify the student body and ignite school spirit.

“We said if we want to do something, we got to start with the first game. We can’t let it pass,” Perez said; she expects a bigger turnout next weekend, when the Bears face off against Westminster College at Francis Field, and SU has an entire week to inform students.

The University Pep Band is also expected to perform next week.

Perez hopes that SU’s efforts will prompt students to take the initiative and start their own tailgates, but in the interim, SU will continue to provide a grill, chips, dip and some beverages to entice students.

“We’re going to continue to promote on a smaller scale,” Perez said. “I think we want to use the resources we have in SU to get the tradition started.”

While the University is not the size of many schools renowned for their tailgating traditions, Perez thinks the student body is ready to tailgate.

“We don’t want to force it upon any student,” Perez said of the push to tailgate. “We want it to be something that students want to do.”

Perez hopes that the tailgating tradition will extend beyond football and will continue for all University athletic events throughout the year.

Junior Michael Young, who went to the inaugural tailgate, said he was only one of four students at the event but hopes to see a rise in attendance.

“I’ll definitely come back next week,” Young said. “It would be cool to have a tradition so everyone’s not in the library all the time.”

He added that the low attendance may be due less to the unpopularity of campus athletics and more due to the time of the game. Next week’s game will take place at night.

“I woke up at 12 [noon] and everyone was still sleeping,” Young said of his housemates.

With additional reporting by Ben Sales.

One new program of Student Union, the Chipotle Challenge, aims to encourage students’ participation in campus activities. Nelson’s brainchild, the Challenge provides free burritos at sports games and major campus events.

According to Nelson, Student Union (SU) wants to focus on athletics this year, especially on the heels of the school’s three national championships earned last year.

“Lot of students love Chipotle and it’s free; I think it’s really going to drive kids towards involvement,” he said.

Many students said that free Mexican food would encourage them to attend more student events.

“I think college students jump at any opportunity for free food, especially Chipotle, so I would be there,” freshman Laura Beckman said.

Freshman Joseph Marcus said that the desire for Chipotle is widespread on campus.

“I would definitely go there if they had free Chipotle,” Marcus said. “Chipotle is a strong motivating factor for all college students, including myself.”

However, others feel that the new program will not make an impact.

“[Having free Chipotle] will probably increase attendance, but I don’t think it will increase it by a huge amount,” Doug Horn, a senior and residential advisor, said.

Nelson has been coordinating with Chipotle since April.

“[Chipotle was] very eager to work with us, get their name out there in conjunction with students’ events and to get students out there,” Nelson said.

SU’s encouragement of school spirit goes beyond free food. This year will see the return of GoCrossCampus, an Internet game in which residential colleges compete against each other to conquer various regions of Washington University’s campus in a format similar to that of the board game Risk.

In order to be further in touch with students, another new program known as “Flash Drives for Freshmen” will provide every freshman with a flash drive containing information and links to useful sites for activities, the judicial code and other practical places.