Homecoming Committee on the 'Grind' in Preparation for October

The Prestige team has been hard at work since March,  contacting vendors, sponsors and performers to make sure the 87^th Howard University Homecoming is a success and today the school gets a taste of what the celebration will entail.

On any given day in the Homecoming office, a group of students can be seen hard at work preparing for this year's celebration, but on the gloomy morning of Sept. 2, the office was empty accept for three students Shenice McKnight, a senior marketing major; Orisa Henderson, a junior theater arts major; and Jaeron Mann, a junior broadcast journalism major.

McKnight and Henderson, the chair and co-chairs of the Prestige Homecoming committee, are preparing for a meeting with a sponsor to finalize deal points and logistics for the Homecoming week and Mann is researching possible participants for the Celebrity Basketball Game, the event she is coordinating this year.  

It was approximately one month until Homecoming season begins, which meant there were only a couple weeks left for the Prestige team to smooth out all of the kinks in the most highly anticipated event of the Howard University school year.

From Oct. 12 to Oct. 22, campus and areas all over the city will be focused on one thing—what's going on at HU, a fact that worried McKnight in late July when she was given the news that homecoming would no longer be funded by the student activities fee.

"A lot of the HU claim to fame is Homecoming," McKnight, who served as the basketball game coordinator last year, said. "When I found out I internalized it and thought, ‘It would be the homecoming I'm over that doesn't have any money.'"

What is usually a $500,000 spectacle had to be significantly reduced and restructured in order to fit into the new budget which is comprised of mostly fundraising dollars and money that was left over in the homecoming account from the year before.

"We have to make homecoming a success no matter what," McKnight said. "The fact is we students look forward to it and I have to be that motivator and encourage my staff toward excellence."

Kevin Reed, the advisor to the homecoming committee and seven other organizations on campus, says McKnight is doing just that.

"I enjoy working with Shenice," Reed said. "I have complete confidence in knowing that the things I don't have time to get to will get handled. She takes a whole lot of pressure off of me."

In an effort to reduce costs, the Prestige team had to search other places for money and support for the event, which was the purpose of the Sept. 2 meeting. For the first time in Howard University Homecoming history, a partnership has been formed with BET to provide staging, performers and equipment for some of the week's events. 

The team at BET is really excited about working with Howard in this capacity for the first time, but most excited about an innovative aspect of Homecoming that the team developed on their own—the Grind to Prestige web series. In fact, a phone conference meeting between the D.C. and New York BET offices was stopped just to talk about the series. 

For the duration of the homecoming experience, the staff has been the subject of a web reality series that shows the day-to-day struggles faced by the coordinators of one of the biggest homecomings in the nation. 

Filmed by Howard University student Justin Dean, one of the forces behind the popular on-campus blog, HU Reaction, Grind to Prestige captures the drama that exists within the staff-- in the first episode alone a coordinator was removed from his position. But McKnight doesn't want the show to be all about that.

"Homecoming is extremely dramatic," McKnight said. "Something happens every day that causes people to argue, but at the same time there are triumphs. We are doing work every day and I think the show lets people know what it takes to make homecoming, homecoming."

It's just a matter of weeks before the hard work of the Homecoming staff will come to life, but tonight at 7p.m. in Cramton Auditorium, we will get a brief taste of just what is in store for Homecoming 2011.