Students participated in ice breaker games with their Resident Assistants and fellow new students during the second Lion Craze event on Sunday, August 13.
Zachary Araki/ The Lion's Roar 

Lion Craze brought together freshman residents through a series of games and icebreakers.

Lion Craze was held Aug. 13 at 7 p.m. in the Pennington Center. The socializing event employed the team building company Playfair with help from the Division for Student Affairs Leadership Ambassadors to entertain the attendees. Campus Activities Board Coordinator Nick Elliott expressed his thoughts about Lion Craze.  

“I personally love Lion Craze Playfair,” said Elliott. “It’s a good opportunity for students to get connected with at least one other person that they’re not already connected with here, so you don’t have to come with anyone. You can come by yourself or you can come with a group. You still get to know more people or get to know new people.”

Neil Bourgeois, a senior communication major worked with the Office for Student Engagement to organize the event.

“Lion Craze is the perfect way to give you a little push, to get you out of your comfort zone if you’re not used to that, to just meet people,” said Bourgeois.

A desire to help students become familiar with each other during Welcome Week inspired the creation of Lion Craze.

“We talked about how this is the first time the students are here. If students aren’t connected within the first day, basically the first 24 hours, what’s gonna keep them here at the institution?” said Elliott. “We wanted to bring in an activity like Playfair, which is a company you can hire in. They do this across the country, but literally, what they do is they work to connect students with at least one other individual on campus or connect with the campus so that they want to stay here and feel included and welcomed to the institution.”

Lion Craze was first held by the university last year. The last Lion Craze, however, did not carry the expected benefits of a first year event.

“We are still kind of looking at it as the first year,” said Elliott. “Last year was very different in the sense that our population that we had attending was students that could make it to campus because it was during the flood. We had a very small population that was able to attend just because there was only a small population of students here on campus. This year, we didn’t really change it up that much because we still wanted to make sure the first way we did it actually was gonna work well. It was hard to judge or change anything when we didn’t have the full potential the first time.”