Laurel Hungerford / For UCI Alumni Association
UCI students show their spirit at the presentation of the 2009 Homecoming Court during the street festival. The king and queen are crowned at the basketball game's halftime.
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Homecoming adds up to fun
Behind-the-scenes statistics offer detailed look at UCI's annual alumni get-together
UC Irvine’s 2010 homecoming celebration is Saturday, Feb. 27, and while the basketball game pitting the Anteaters against Cal State Northridge’s Matadors is the climax, there are many other components to the planning and execution of the day. The annual Anteater get-together, which began in 2005 with 150 guests in the Bren Events Center’s Koll Room, features a pregame street festival that has grown large enough to require closing Mesa Road. And last year – for the first time – UCI’s homecoming moved into the Twitterverse, with attendees tweeting from the event.
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Here, courtesy of the UCI Alumni Association, are some behind-the-scenes statistics on the 2009 celebration:
- 3,000+: Anteater fans attending the street festival
- 7: months put into planning
- 53,140: invitational phone calls made to alumni (100 per hour through a partnership with CallFire, a UCI-alumni-founded company). In addition, 9,505 postcards and 15,501 e-mail invitations were sent.
- 1,889: online transactions processed
- 17: chapters participating in Greek Village – the first time student groups joined the street festival
- 2: live karaoke performances by Rameen Talesh, now UCI’s assistant vice chancellor for student affairs
- 50: percent increase in attendance from 2008
- 812: barbecue meals eaten
- 4: kegs of beer sold
- 0: arrests for public drunkenness
- 1: headline act, Melee, sponsored by ASUCI
- 1,950: UCI pennants distributed
- 72: boxes of crayons given away in kid packs
- 4,000: Anteater fans attending the basketball game, 900 of them current UCI students – the second-largest student crowd of the 2009 season
- 63: volunteers working that day
- Unquantifiable: ’Eater Nation spirit generated
— Michelle Williams, UCI Alumni Association
