Cabrini’s Edith Robb Dixon field was ominously quiet during the school’s homecoming festivities as Cabrini’s fall teams were on the road, playing games on their opponents’ home turf.
Homecoming weekend is a staple among colleges and universities all over the country. For each and every one of these schools, these special ceremonial weekends that invite the student body, faculty, staff and alumnus to campus to celebrate school spirit are synonymous with a big home game for one— if not multiple— of its sports teams.
Schools that don’t have football teams, such as Cabrini, usually have a few of their other fall sports teams play throughout the weekend on their home turf. This year, the Cavaliers had a ton of games on their schedule for this year’s homecoming weekend. There was a catch, however: They were all road games.
“I was disappointed that we couldn’t get a game or two physically on campus, but that is not the intention moving forward,” Jackie Marciano, Cabrini’s director of alumni engagement and development, said.
Athletic Director Brad Koch echoed the same sentiment.
“This is nobody’s fault,” Koch said. “Next year, we have every intention to have a home game [on homecoming weekend].”
According to Marciano, there were a lot of moving parts when it came to planning the weekend.
The planning for homecoming 2017 began just after homecoming 2016 ended. The homecoming planning committee, which used to entirely consist of Cabrini’s SEaL office, is now run by Cabrini’s alumni office in conjunction with SEaL.
Homecoming weekend was originally scheduled for the weekend of Sept. 23, but the offices felt it was best to spread the weekend, as well as some other big events, throughout the month of September.
Since freshman move in day for the fall 2017 semester was the weekend of Aug. 30, followed by Labor Day weekend and Cabrini Night at the Phillies the two weeks after, the committee decided to push homecoming to mid-October.
“We wanted to space it out a little more so the parents and the students have a little bit of time away from each other. We thought this time in October would be nice to have everyone come back, so it’s spaced out more instead of everything happening in September,” Marciano said.
The other obstacle in the way was the fact that Cabrini President Donald Taylor asked the alumni office if they could merge all of their alumni events into one big one.
On the other side of the coin, Cabrini’s sports schedules within their conference, the Colonial States Athletic Conference (CSAC), are made 18 months in advance. The alumni office contacted CSAC about moving a home game onto homecoming weekend, to no avail.
As for how not having a home game over this special weekend, it is not supposed to have a huge effect on the weekend’s attendance. The school has sold over 300 tickets to Cabrini alum and families. That is over 100 more than they sold last year.
While there was no home game, there have been plenty of other events going on around Cabrini’s campus over homecoming weekend, including the Bonfire Pep Rally on Thursday, Oct. 12, the 60th annual Mr. and Miss Cabrini Pageant Oct. 13 and Big Prize Bingo on Oct. 14.
While it is tradition for a Cabrini team to play at home on homecoming weekend, the athletes were just focused on playing, no matter where they played.
“Playing on the road during homecoming doesn’t bother me,” Payton Greene, a junior on Cabrini’s women’s soccer team, said. “I mean, yes, I would love to play at home in front of our fans, but it’s better to beat a team on their home field.”
