How Prepared For Jive Fest Are You?

Fall at Dickinson. Students are adorned in trendy scarfs and ugg boots. Cold hands clench hot cups of coffee to make the early morning trips to language class more tolerable. The campus is beautified by the changing foliage. It is very much decorative gourd season. 

Elsewhere, the Jive Turkeys have invited freshmen and other newly interested students to come to practice, learn the sport, and, if you are truly lucky, make a doomed trip to Gettysburg for the first scrimmage of the year. After weekend tournaments at other local colleges, the time has come for Jive to host their annual fall tournament: Jive Fest.

The Fest is no ordinary weekend, it is one that requires serious planning of numerous parties from numerous parties. Reminded of this task as I’ve been readying The Godfeathers for another trip back to campus (and another chance to lose in the finals to Jimmy Changas), I decided to ask myself how prepared I was for this weekend. This question eventually snowballed to consider not just how prepared I was, but how prepared ANYONE would be going into the weekend. Thus, in the interest of helpfulness, I have decided to analyze just how ready each person could be, depending on their age and experiences. Here are my conclusions:

Freshman: aka What’s a Jive Fest
Preparedness Level: You are utterly unprepared for Jive Fest
In truth, unprepared is perhaps underselling it. While you’ve undoubtedly heard the upperclassmen referring to the mythical event - one that you have yet to experience, might I remind you – the stories probably sound so preposterous (someone passing out using a sweatshirt as pants) or overblown (a townie punching a visiting player for standing in the road) or exaggerated (breaking the beams of a house with a dance party), that your idea of what Jive Fest truly is remains unclear. You know there is probably some frisbee to play, and some sort of party on Saturday. But you might be unclear who, or what, an HTOD is, and you were thinking of getting some homework done on Friday to stay ahead. Nonsense. As Rick Sanchez once said, you quit school, but you still got some learning to do. 

This category also applies to transfer students, non-drinkers, and literally any Lafayette player.

Sophomore/Junior: aka Give me HTOD, or Give Me Death
Preparedness Level: You taught yourself how to open a beer with your eye sockets

This might be the perfect place to be, at least as an undergrad. You’ve got one HTOD under your belt (and know what that acronym means), but you are still a year or two away from having to house teams and host a station and watch the world burn. You’ll be the most enthusiastic team leader on Saturday night because you want to make up for your first HTOD when you went too hard during trailer park bombs and had to be helped home before the dance party started.

Wherever the Friday night party is, it’ll be you and your cohorts that help the alumni take over the first senior house, which will one day be your house. This process will repeat forever.

Senior: aka Please don't knock my house down
Preparedness Level: You’ll be fine by your first Hurricane
The last three years have brought you to this moment: your senior year Jive Fest. But what should be a moment of excitement is a source of dread before the weekend starts. You must house a team! And run a station! And put all your stuff away, lest you want it ruined or lost. On the plus side, the alumni know you the best, and will at least be mildly respectful to your house while there are only a few of them on campus. After the 5th or 6th shows up, you’re screwed, and you know it. So, grab a Hurricane from the case and enjoy the ride. You can get the freshmen to clean up your house Sunday afternoon.

Young Alumni: aka No parents, no rules!
Preparedness Level: You took multiple days off from work to be here
It’s your first Jive Fest as an alum. You survived the experience as an undergrad and finally get to experience the highs of being back on campus as an alum and the lows of the murderous, real-life hangover you will soon unleash on yourself. Maybe there is a professor or two you want to catch up with, and that’s the excuse you are using for taking off work. But deep down you know the idea of having a couple extra free days on Dickinson’s campus was too good to pass up, so take the PTO and trade your new mattress for a couch and sleep through the first game on Sunday. That degree you’ve been meaning to hang on your wall (but won’t) says you’ve earned it.

Not-Quite-Old Alumni: aka Who Are These Children?
Preparedness Level: You bought all of Walmart’s Pedialyte. ALL of it.
By your sixth or seventh Jive Fest, you tell yourself you know better. While you still know a handful of people on campus, sleeping on a beer soaked floor hurts significantly more than it did a couple years. Monday will hurt like hell, if you go into the office at all. Yet somehow, you’re optimistic. Sure, you aren’t 22 anymore, but it’s not like this is your only party tournament of the year. If you can handle MARS or Wildwood in your mid-twenties (meaning in athlete years, you haven’t even hit your prime yet!), you can surely handle Jive Fest, right?

It depends on how you wake up. If you wake up drunk, you are in the clear. Grab a warm, flat microbrew and some Sheetz and power through Sunday. But if you find yourself hungover, then you are in trouble. On the car ride home, sobered up and in a world of pain, you will turn to your passenger and say “never again.” Your passenger won’t say a word, they’ll merely nod and stare out the window as you both silently know that this isn’t true, and that there will, in fact, be an “again.”


Old Alumni: aka What Am I Doing Here?
Preparedness Level: You Invented This Shit!

Pictured: Inventing this shit.

That’s not a joke. You may have literally invented Jive Fest. And if not Jive Fest, there’s a decent chance that you invented HTOD, or certain parts of HTOD. Point is, you transcend Jive Fest altogether, existing somewhere above its physical plane as a Party God. Your foresight, your wisdom, your creativity, have allowed this weird annual tradition to continue to blossom. Others have followed in your inebriated footsteps and built upon your raucous foundations to keep this tradition alive. The current hosts of Jive Fest may not even know your name, and if they do it is spoken in hushed tones, such is the reverence for you, His Majesty: The Sage of Rage, The Sultan of Stack Race, The Despot of Debauchery.

You also shouldn’t be here. You’re too old. Go to MOSH or something.