by Boris Gaidai
(Edits by Arren)
In between the Women’s and Men’s Basketball games on the 12th, the school celebrated the inauguration of this year’s Homecoming Court. The ceremony was the culmination of three days of events to celebrate Pensacola State College, its students, and faculty. Among these activities were cookouts, meet and greets, and a scavenger hunt. The celebration was a fun diversion from the rigors of academic life.
The Homecoming King and Queen, Gabriel Nees and Mikayla Jolene, were selected from ten PSC students.
Mikayla Jolene is local to Pensacola, loves heart to heart conversations, spending time with her and her fiance’s families, and is a big fan of queso. She is currently attending PSC and is set to graduate this December. For her future plans, she says she’s looking forward to finding a house for her and her fiance to start their lives together and starting her own business doing hair.
Gabriel Nees is a fan of sports like fencing and football, he also enjoys going out with friends. He’s currently a freshman Business student with plans of going into HR. After he gets his degree he plans on joining a big company to try to make a difference in the workforce, and “stop the stereotype around HR.”
This year’s Homecoming celebrations marks the third in an attempt at reviving a Homecoming tradition at PSC. According to PSC’s President, Dr. Meadows, there was a Homecoming tradition at our school “some 20 years ago,” but he was unaware of exactly when or why the tradition stopped.
“Homecoming has long been a tradition among institutions of higher education, and for some reason it fell by the wayside at Pensacola State. It’s been reactivated over the last three years, Sheila Nichols, Dr. Stevenson, and others initiated the discussion to have it again.”
One of the people who has been involved in the Homecoming revival has been Hailey Lotz, the Executive Director for Development, Alumni and Athletics. To her and others, a big part of reinvigorating the Homecoming tradition here was to help get students more involved with life on campus.
“It’s easier to get involved at colleges with traditional campus living. In our environment, we have nontraditional students, so they come, they go to class, and then they leave. They have other things to do, or maybe they don’t live on this side of town. So we get that, but we also want to give them a space to come for extracurriculars.”
“Talking to our alumni who came here during a time where sororities and fraternities were a really big thing. Even today, those are friendships that they’ve carried their entire lifetime. Why can’t we still do that? I think that’s the point.”
As this was the third year of this revival, the process for organizing Homecoming is now figured out. When speaking of previous years, Lotz said “Whenever you do something new it’s hard to gauge where it’s going or the excitement that’s going to be behind it. Looking back on our first year now, we’ve seen it grow, and that’s really incredible. And I think it’s just going to keep growing …to see our other students here and really get behind our teams, that’s encouraging. We love to see that.”