Tomorrow’s Blue-White game will be different for John Tecce.
Instead of waking up early to take down his tent and rally a group of tens or hundreds of students, the Paternoville Coordination Committee Vice President finally gets his lone chance to tailgate during the 2009-10 school year.
“It’s definitely nice,” Tecce said. “As much as we love doing [Paternoville], as much as it’s a part of our lives during the fall – it’s what we do – it’s nice to be able to have fun on a Friday night and not have to worry about getting up at 5:30 in the morning… It’s nice to just be able to wake up, go tailgate, and just go into the stadium whenever we feel like it.”
Although there is no campout this week, Tecce and the rest of the PCC have been diligently planning for the 2010 season and a major change to the sign-in process is in the works.
No longer will students need to arrive early to sign in for Paternoville as the PCC, along with the athletic department, has developed an online sign-in system to prevent students from arriving to Gate A nearly 24 hours before a campout begins.
“We’ve been talking about it since week one of last season because of the explosion of popularity for people that are doing [Paternoville] week to week,” Tecce said. “Kids kept coming earlier and earlier and we finally said something needs to change.”
And the system has certainly changed.
For the 2010 season, students will be able to initially sign-in for Paternoville via Angel, PCC President Alex Cohen said, adding that the Angel group will essentially act as the “short list” the PCC has used in the past to keep track of registration.
The Angel page, Cohen said, will be linked to Student Central and will open at varying times on a week-to-week basis.
“When that time hits, students can go online, they put their name in, their group members names in, how many people are in their group and we’ll build the list that way,” Cohen said. “The computer will decide when each person signed in and after you sign in on Angel you will come to Paternoville and myself and the other officers will sign people in like we have in the past.”
The main reason for the change was safety. Both university police and the athletic department saw it as an issue that had to be addressed, Cohen said.
The PCC has also floated around the concept for a camper loyalty system, but Cohen said there was too much disagreement about how it should be run and as a result it’s been put on the backburner.
“There’s just too many different parameters that need to go into it,” he said. “We hope one day we can maybe put in a system like that, but [PCC public relations chair Dan] Saxton and I definitely believe that putting a loyalty system takes away from the average student wanting to do Paternoville, like a senior camping out his first time for front row seats.
“That’s one of the purer things about Paternoville that we didn’t want to get rid of and that’s why we probably aren’t going to put the loyalty system in.”
But for all the preparation already going into the 2010 season, Cohen said he’s excited to let loose for the Blue-White game.
“Blue-White is a lot of students’ chance, myself included, to tailgate and just enjoy the game,” he said. “We actually don’t have anything planned for this weekend. We just get to enjoy the game, not worry about where were sitting and just enjoy the experience.”
