Students braved temperatures in the 90s last weekend to spend time with their families as part of the university's annual Family Weekend and created an on-campus atmosphere that junior Tim Wiles described as similar to Pig Roast.
"It was electric," he said. "I could feel it. People were excited about their parents, excited about the football game. It was a more connected campus than ever this year because the whole campus was doing the same thing."
About 950 families participated in this year's Family Weekend and attended a variety of university-sponsored events from Friday until Sunday.
Courtney Matthews, major gifts officer, helped oversee the planning process of Family Weekend and said that the number of families that attended this year's weekend was a slight increase from last year.
"We had a feeling that would happen because we didn't have a home football game last year," Matthews said.
The football game on Saturday against the University of Delaware was the big attraction for Family Weekend. The original allotment of tickets was sold out before the weekend started and some families were placed on a waiting list for tickets.
Some of the families who had been on a waiting list for football tickets were able to purchase them when they arrived on campus because Delaware returned about 430 unsold tickets out of its 1,000-ticket allotment.
"I know we were able to get all of the senior families off the wait list," Matthews said, "so all the seniors had the opportunity to go to the game and I think we had 100 additional families. Most people I ran into the day of [the game] seemed to have gotten tickets, all the way down to some freshman families. I don't think we got everybody in, but we came very close."
Although most families were able to get into the game, Matthews said she would like to get a better system in place for next year's Family Weekend in which families with extra tickets could sell them to other families looking for tickets.
"We did have a lot of people at the welcome center who would say, 'Oh, we were going to bring our younger son but he ended up wanting to stay at home so we have an extra ticket,'" she said.
Some other families had an extra ticket because they had bought it intending to sit with their son or daughter, but the student instead got a ticket to sit in the student section, Matthews said.
While some families had extra tickets, other families who wanted to get a ticket for their student were not able to do so. Matthews said that she would meet with the athletic department to try to enable students to sit with their families, but she cautioned against assuming that issue will be resolved.
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"The problem we need to be mindful of is that there are certain people in those sections with season tickets," Matthews said. "If you get a family of four that bumps up against two season ticket holders, it's not fair for the student to sit in these seats that are basically owned by the season ticket holder."
The football game was not the lone event that drew a large crowd. Saturday evening, the campus a cappella groups performed two concerts, including a sold-out show at the Greek Theater.
Wiles, a member of Off the Cuff, said that the concert was better than previous Family Weekend concerts.
"There was more enthusiasm," Wiles said. "There were more people there. The whole group did better than in the past."
Not all of the events were entertainment-based. There were also student development and academic events. Among those was a talk by President Edward L. Ayers on the Civil War.
Matthews said she heard positive reviews on Ayers' talk from some of the 675 families who registered to attend the event.
"I can tell you that everybody who walked out of that event was blown away and asked us to keep doing it," she said.
Matthews said that she had received a number of compliments on Family Weekend from those families who attended it.
Contact staff writer Andrew Prezioso at andrew.prezioso@richmond.edu
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