Lavender Bowl Renewed For Second Run
BY Curtis Ashley
After its initial run last year, the Lavender Bowl plans to make another appearance for City College’s Lavender Week. Flag football, the featured sports event of the CCNY spirit week, has found its way back into the lineup and plans to leave a bigger mark this year.Introduced by The Campus' sports editor Jeff Weisinger, the Lavender Bowl aims to give the CCNY community the football experience missing on campus since the disbandment of the school’s official team in 1950. “I looked at a lot of what CCNY has done, especially the Lavender Week committee, as far as sports events, and I realized that we could do a lot more,” Weisinger said. “I know there’s a lot of people on social media saying ‘CCNY needs football’, ‘I wish CCNY had football’, kind of trying to build a demand for it.”Well it’s here now. The event gears up for its second go-around, after facing some difficulties in its inaugural year.“The first year was rough,” Weisinger added. “It was really the ultimate learning curve and really as experimental as it gets. I didn’t think it was going to get renewed for a second year.” There was certainly something there; Student Life as well as the CCNY community picked up on it. “The days following last year’s Lavender Bowl, I got a lot of good feedback on it. A lot of people were excited that we brought it,” Weisinger commented.The event took place in the Nat Holman Gymnasium. Each team that played was comprised of seven players, four starters and three reserves. The teams also needed to include at least one female, and two of the active players had to be CCNY students. WCCR, one of the college’s radio stations, was the 2015 Lavender Bowl champion and received a 1st place trophy.In the event’s second year, both Weisinger and Evelyn Ortega, the Assistant Director of the Department of Student Life and Leadership Development, hope to see some improvements. “We’re opening it up to more organizations, such as ROTC. That’s why we made the regulations more flexible in terms of only half the team needing to be CCNY students,” Ortega mentioned. “We didn’t get to promote it as much as we wanted to [last time],” she added, “but everyone that did show up had a really good time.”Students can contact Ortega by email (eortega@ccny.cuny.edu) or by visiting the office of Student Life and Leadership Development in the North Academic Center (Room 1/210), if they are interested in being a part of the Lavender Bowl and/or other activities going on during Lavender Week. The Lavender Bowl will take place on Wednesday, May 11 from 7pm to 10pm.