Painting the 'Burg purple

Student Duke hosts decorating contest for Homecoming

By Ashton Smith, contributing writer
Posted on October 29, 2007

Every JMU home football game, fans paint their faces and deck themselves out in purple and gold. The Student Duke Club took its school spirit even further.

“Paint Harrisonburg Purple” is a new contest the SDC created to let students go all out decorating their dorm rooms, apartments or houses for the Homecoming game against the Richmond Spiders. 

The winners of Paint Harrisonburg Purple were seniors Sasha Cabell, Teresa Garbee and Jessie Bannat.

“We created a scene with the Duke Dog and the Football team “exterminating” the spiders on our living room wall,” Cabell said.  “It took us between 4 and 5 hours, but we had a lot of fun getting into the Homecoming spirit while we worked.”

Since it was the last Homecoming for the roommates, they decided to mix up their usual routine.

“We thought it’d be awesome to experience our last Homecoming Game at JMU from the sideline,” Cabell said.

Senior Samantha Floyd placed third.

“We decorated our balcony with purple Christmas lights,” she said. “We wrapped them around the banister and we also used them to create a web.  We put a spider inside the spider web, along with smaller spiders across the top of the porch.  We then put a banner across the front of the balcony that said ‘squash those spiders’ and there is also a life size duke dog standing on a spider holding a football.”

Floyd said the decorations took up to four days to complete, partly due to rain. 

“I think that the contest was a good idea,” she said.  “It is a way to get people involved in JMU and JMU sports. With the great prizes that were being awarded it gave even more incentive for people to get involved.  It allows people to use their competitiveness to hype up JMU fans.”

Overall, she loved the experience and hopes that it will only continue to grow.

“I think it’s a wonderful idea and the more people that we get involved the more exciting it will become,” she said.  “Soon we will see the whole city painted purple for JMU’s Homecoming weekend.”

The students were given about a week and half to fully complete the decorating.  Then they turned in an application, which gave students the chance to send pictures of their finished product through the club’s e-mail.

“The application pretty much entails one person showing that they are going to show up to three photos of the space they decorated,” said Paige Sumner, president of the SDC. 

“From there we pick out a top five and go look at them in person. They give us their name and phone number, verifying that it is their apartment or their house. It is only one entry per residence.” 

The Paint Harrisonburg Purple Contest Committee, a group of five people including Taylor Adkins, faculty advisor to the SDC, was formed in the SDC to judge the entries.

The winners were announced on Friday afternoon and informed about their package of prizes which included a pizza party from L’Italia, smoothies for every person in the apartment or dorm and four sideline passes to the Homecoming game.

“They literally have the best seat in the house,” Adkins said.

Sumner is hoping that next year the amount of participants will grow but was happy with the amount of entries since the contest is so new.

The idea of painting houses originated from Adkins, who said he did the same thing when he was in college.

“For the last two years of my undergraduate year, me and my housemates would decorate our house for major football games,” Adkins said.  “We had a 25 foot banner for the Delaware game that said ‘UD Senseless.’”

Adkins took his experience and ran with it.

“As the faculty adviser I proposed to start a competition to deck out student houses to beat the Spiders inside dorms and outside of their houses or apartments to show school spirit and back the football team,” he said.  “We have had a good response so far but it is relatively small in comparison this year because it’s the first year we are doing it.  The hopes are that it is the beginning of an annual contest.”

While he knows it will take a while for students to pick up on it, Adkins wants to see the JMU community continue to carry it on.

He said, “It would be really cool to inspire the student body to decorate their places so when you had alumni, people visiting or away teams coming into town they could see the apartments decorated and see that JMU football is not just a one day thing and the whole community is behind it.”