Family Weekend Recap

Family Weekend 2012 is over, and hopefully those parents who came have found their way back home safe and sound.  It was wonderful to see so many families on campus.  Lots of smiling faces, happy parents, students who were showing off their campus with great pride.  The Benson Center was bustling pretty much all of Friday as families arrived.

There were a great deal of activities over the weekend, both those sponsored by Student Union and by student organizations.  I heard about a lovely fundraising auction in The Barn by a sorority, who raised $10,000 in support of one of their sorority sisters, a junior, who has cancer.  I believe the money will be given as a donation to the hospital where she is seeking treatment, but if you are one of the sorority parents and I have this wrong, please email at parents@wfu.edu and let me know.

Saturday’s main event was tailgating and the football game.  Sadly, the weather did not cooperate and it rained – at times just a needle-fine mist but others it was full-on raindrops.  However, that did not seem to stop most of the tailgaters, and I saw many a parent in ponchos with their students and their friends in the parking lots before the game.  Many of our young lady Deacs still managed to wear sundresses along with their raingear, so at least they were festive.  The one nice thing about the 12:30 pm kickoff for football was that it gave plenty of time for families to dry off and head out to a nice dinner with their student and his/her friends.  I imagine that every good eatery in town was packed with Wake Families.

Unfortunately we lost our football game to Duke, but the sports weekend was not a total loss.  Coach Tony da Luz of women’s soccer got his 200th win, and there is a nice story about that piece of Wake Forest sports history on Wakeforestsports.com.

Many thanks to all the families who came back for Family Weekend, to Student Union for putting on such a great show, and to all our student organizations who hosted their own private functions.  It was great to show a little Southern hospitality to the extended Wake Forest family.  And for those who couldn’t make it, there will be a spring Family Weekend the weekend of February 22-23, 2013.  More details to come from Student Union later in the year.

Edited to add: Many thanks to one of our parent readers who brought this to our attention:  “Alpha Delta Pi fundraiser at the Hawthorne Inn on Friday night.  They had a silent auction. The Demon Divas performed.  And over $10,000 were raised for their charity, the Ronald McDonald House.”  I think the original parents I had spoken to were pretty adamant that they were in The Barn.  If so, it’s doubly impressive that two fundraisers could be held in that same night to such great success.  Congratulations, ladies!