On the weekend of Sept. 26, Pitt-Johnstown community members celebrated an annual homecoming. The celebration’s first day of homecoming included events such as a John P. Murtha Center groundbreaking, a Freshmen Convocation and a town hall meeting.
Also Friday, there were a window-decorating contest, a dinner cooked for students and faculty and an alumni tailgating party.
Those are just six out of 11 events planned for one day. Pitt-Johnstown’s homecoming committee members seemed to be ambitious this year, perhaps too ambitious.
Generally attendance at events was poor from what could have been poor planning.
The Freshmen Convocation in particular had an attendance of only approximately 25 freshmen out of a total class of about 950 students. That is less than 3 percent of the freshmen class.
More students may have attended if the committee members didn’t schedule the program at a time of day when freshmen some students still were in classes.
At the event, Pitt-Johnstown’s President Jem Spectar called out not only the freshmen class, but the entire student body, saying he was disappointed in the attendance.
Being that it was called the Freshmen Convocation, it was unclear to upperclassmen that they too were invited along with their families and the faculty.
Maybe Spectar should be disappointed not with the students, but with a grand event that didn’t seem to fit with other afternoon celebrations.
Unlike the Freshmen Convocation, the Pitt-Johnstown’s women’s volleyball game had a packed gymnasium. However, people viewing the Friday night game missed the fireworks display put on not even a full hour and a half after the game had started.
While watching the end of the game, visitors could only hear the sounds of exploding fireworks outside the Wellness Center.
Similar to Friday’s overwhelming number of events, 11 of them, Saturday started at 9 a.m. and continued until 9 p.m. with 17 events.
Planning such a busy weekend not only took a great deal of time but also took a good amount of resources. With so many different events going on, students, alumni and community members couldn’t possibly make it to all of them.
The financial resources used for the weekend may have been put to better use elsewhere. The schedule was too clustered with too many options that ran into each other.
It could seem as the homecoming committee members tried to put on an over-the-top weekend for visitors. There were good intentions but just not the best outcomes.
Maybe next year, the homecoming coordinators will plan fewer events in return for better attendance. Sometimes, less is more.