Homecoming on hold for fraternity

While many greeks are celebrating Homecoming this week, Sigma Phi Beta, the new gay-friendly fraternity on campus, has put Homecoming on the backburner in order to celebrate a different occasion: the initiation of its new pledge class.

“We’ve been really busy,” said Michael Lathery, finance chair for SPB. “We just did our initiation last week, so we crossed over 12 new brothers, essentially doubling our size with our pledge class.”

Freshman Matt Ruehling was just initiated. 

“It was really exciting,” he said. “It was kind of intense, but it was fun.”

Ruehling said it was a nice ending to a pleasant pledging process.

“No, pledging was not that bad,” he said. “I really enjoyed the pledge process. I really grew from it, and I really learned more what it’s going to be like being in the brotherhood.”

Although worn out from the initiation, the brothers aren’t completely abandoning Homecoming, Lathery said.

“We have a sort of Homecoming pumpkin carving, apple cider event planned to kind of start integrating the older brothers with the newer brothers,” he said. “We’re going to try and see who can carve the most IU-inspired pumpkin.”

The fraternity is using this Homecoming as an opportunity to learn what kinds of future events to plan.

“Last year for Homecoming — with the first pledge class — we weren’t even officially brothers yet,” said senior Drew Porter, brotherhood and bonding chairman and IFC representative for SPB. “So this is kind of our first Homecoming as a fraternity, so we’re not used to what the other fraternities do yet.”

Porter said in the future they hope to have more typical greek events.

“I’ve heard about a lot of just paired events and paired socials that they’re doing, parties and such with each other,” Porter said.

Lathery said the fraternity’s biggest challenge regarding Homecoming celebrations is that the fraternity is located off campus.

“I think off-campus homecoming and on-campus Homecoming are a world apart,” he said. “I think it’s just an outreach issue. I feel like off-campus fraternities don’t do their fair share of communicating with on-campus fraternities, and vice versa.”

But Porter said that in their case, the greek community has been more supportive and welcoming than they had anticipated.

“Everyone’s been really excited about pairing with us and just working with us and getting to know us better,” he said.

Pairing is something the brothers really want to do, Lathery said.

“Pairing is really essential to the culture,” he said. “We want to immerse ourselves in that.”

Next year, Sigma Phi hopes to participate in Homecoming with the vigor of the rest of the greek community, Porter said.

“We’re going to take this week to learn to be big,” he said. “So watch out.”