Additional reporting by Lorena Coleman
Teams ranging from Phi Nu’s pageant girls to Delta Omega’s marching band performed at 2016’s Stomp Fest, but ultimately Theta Psi’s monks took home the win Saturday night in Collins Alumni Auditorium.
“It felt absolutely incredible,” Theta Psi member Dalton Wanser said. “I wasn’t expecting it, and your heart kind of just explodes with happiness. We had a goal going in to have 100% participation from the crowd, and then our ultimate goal was to win it.”
Sponsored by SGA and African American Student Services and presented by Kappa Iota Theta, the seventh annual event featured men and women’s social clubs on campus performing an approximately 10 minute, student-choreographed stomp routine. The Phi Beta Sigma stomp team was the guest performance at the show for the second year in a row, and students Conner Crocker and Jacky Gomez hosted.
Junior Roman Ottinger choreographed Theta Psi’s prize-winning stomp routine and said he was glad all the hard work and long nights they put in paid off.
“It feels really good,” Ottinger said on his win. “We put a lot of work into it this year. For the past three months we’ve been coming up with stomps, teaching them, mixing the music, choreographing the dances and practicing up to 15 hours per week — up until last week when we started practicing 20 to 30 hours per week.”
Men’s social club Sigma Iota Delta received second place for its caveman-inspired stomp, and women’s social club Pi Delta received third place with its flight-attendant theme.
A guest panel of judges was brought in for the Saturday performance, and the winners were chosen based on the stomp choreography, theme of each club’s group and audience participation.
“We came into this knowing that we had a really great group of guys and knowing that we could have a really good show, so we put in the work to win,” Ottinger noted. “We said the whole time that we’re going to shoot for first because we didn’t want to shoot for anything lower than that. We wanted to give it our best, and that’s what we did.”
Photos by Becca Risley