Starting Saturday, the Wesleyan Student Assembly (WSA) will begin a program known as “Fan Vans” to bus University students to other campuses to support athletic teams at their away games. The first Fan Van will take students to Williams College to support the football team at Williams’ Homecoming game.
Nicole Okai ’14, WSA Transportation Committee Representative, came up with the idea for the buses because of a similar concept at her high school.
“When I thought of the idea, I had the Williams game in mind because I knew that it was coming up,” Okai said. “Football was the reason I wanted to implement this here, because if you look at their season they’ve only had two home games so far. You rarely hear people talking about going to away games, so it’d be nice for there to be something like this available to students.”
Okai brought the idea to WSA Transportation Committee Chair Zachary Malter ’13, who worked with her to set up the program and obtain funding from the Student Budget Committee (SBC).
“We’re hoping the SBC will continue to fund more events,” Malter said. “We want to have events for a variety of different sports in both men’s and women’s teams. There’s no commitment [that the program will continue past] this first game, so we’re hoping to have a really successful trial run.”
The first “van,” a rented school bus that can accommodate around 50 students, will be free to University students, but the price could increase a small amount in the future.
“Depending on how the funding goes, we might end up charging students a little bit,” Okai said. “Students probably wouldn’t mind paying five dollars for something they wanted to do anyway, since they would have had to pay money for gas to get there otherwise.”
Within two hours of sending out a campus-wide e-mail explaining the program, 20 students responded showing interest. In the future, Malter and Okai are considering creating a system where students can let them know what games they’d like to attend, since the buses can only run when there are enough students interested in a particular game.
“We want to play it by ear and gauge student interest to see what games students are really interested in going to,” Okai said. “In the future I could see it being possible to get to two different games during a weekend.”
They also hope to work with other student groups around campus that are involved in planning events for University spirit.
“We’re hoping to work with WesPep and maybe the pep band, and we’ve already had a lot of interest from student groups and fans of different teams,” Malter said. “We want the bus ride to be part of the experience—with people dressing up and making flags and supporting the teams.”
Students going on the buses will be required to go round-trip, a distinction that Okai believes will keep the buses filled with fans.
“This is not a service to get to another college campus,” she said. “Athletes said it’s discouraging when all they hear is the jeering from the opposing team and there are no Wesleyan fans. The whole point of this is to go and support Wesleyan teams, and emphasizing the fact that you have to come back on the bus makes it clear that you should go to support the team.”
Okai and Malter hope to run a few more fan vans next semester, but do not anticipate this becoming a weekly service.
“We’re really targeting everything towards this first game and we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves,” Malter said. “This is a completely new initiative and there was no real foundation for it, so the success of this will determine the course of action for the future.”