Newsfeed
Printer-Friendly ModeSA readies for fall semester, prepares for Battle of the Valleys
June 23, 2008 —
Plans for the upcoming sixth annual Battle of the Valleys competition are high on the Student Association's priority list as its members meet during the summer.
The week-long fundraising event highlighted by the gridiron showdown between the SVSU Cardinals and the Lakers of Grand Valley State University is set to begin on Sunday, Sept. 7. A 12:30 p.m. kickoff on Sept. 13 provides SA members with minimal time to collaborate and plan events, as the fall semester begins on Aug. 25.
"Battle of the Valleys usually happens around Halloween, which gives us more time to organize everything," SA Speaker of the House Ryan Kanine said, "but since this year it's the third week of school, we really can't wait until fall classes start to begin the brainstorming process on how we're going to fundraise."
In lieu of foreseen time constraints, SA members began their initial planning at the end of the winter semester. Campus Events Director Becky Griffin is leading the efforts of her committee."We invited all Registered Student Organizations (RSO's) to our end-of-the-year meetings and started planning events," she said.
According to Griffin, many of the traditional Battle of the Valleys events that were successful in the past will reappear this fall and encourages all students to get involved."We're going to do Cardinal Idol, the date auction, the car smash, corner collecting, and gas pumping along with newly planned activities," she said.
"We've had a lot of people join our Facebook group so far, and we've also set up a VSpace group that anyone can join on the SVSU network. We're going to be listing all of our events and activities there," Griffin continued.
Students can make suggestions online for anything from event ideas to slogan proposals for this year's commemorative t-shirt.
Kanine expects that campus RSO's will be helpful.
"We want to take a lot of the successful events SA has put on in the past and distribute their duties among different RSO's who have done a good job with them in previous years," he said. "This will give us more time to plan and execute new events."
SA hopes to tackle Battle of the Valleys and other events and student concerns throughout the year more efficiently as a result of some committee restructuring. Toward the end of the winter semester, seven committees were narrowed down to four: the Student Concerns, Legislative, Allocations, and Campus Events.
"Given that Health and Wellness and Academic Leadership and Development could be categorized as student concerns, we merged them with the Student Concerns committee," Kanine said. "Diversity is also another component that Student Concerns will focus on throughout the year. Organization Resources and Communications (ORC) and Allocations also merged together, which will allow smoother communication between RSO's and the Allocations committee."