Snow­ball Dance Brings in Record Crowd

The Bethel Uni­ver­sity Stu­dent Coun­cil hosted the first school spon­sored dance on Jan. 17.  While the coun­cil ex­pected be­tween 50 and 200 at­ten­dees, over 500 peo­ple showed up to the event. 

“We had or­dered food for about 180 peo­ple and we ran quickly out of drinks since we had far more peo­ple than we had ex­pected,” Paul Cooke, stu­dent coun­cil pres­i­dent, said. “That was an­other sur­prise for me.” 

The Snow­ball dance took place in­side Good­man Gym at Wiekamp Hall. It ran from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. 

Ju­nior Zachary Miller acted as the dance’s DJ and played a wide range of songs. Joshua Searsy, a Ju­nior Crim­i­nal Jus­tice ma­jor, said he ex­pected more gospel mu­sic. He said he felt sur­prised the dance played a wide range of songs, in­clud­ing slow dance songs. 

“When I first went in, I had a cou­ple of pre­con­ceived no­tions that it might be a prod­uct of the Bethel Bub­ble as it were,” Searsy said. “But when we got in there, I thought they re­ally lis­tened to stu­dents and gave us al­most ex­actly the kind of dance we wanted.” 

The coun­cil planned to re­serve chairs and ta­bles from Bethel, but all of the ta­bles and chairs were un­avail­able. Bethel used the ta­bles and chairs for the Re­Fuel Con­fer­ence, tak­ing place the same week­end. 

Kristy Bride­groom, Head of Con­fer­ence Ser­vices and Events at Bethel, helped the coun­cil get three eight-foot ta­bles for food. For seat­ing, the coun­cil pulled out two rows of bleach­ers and brought in a cou­ple couches. 

Cooke said most peo­ple chose to stand on the dance floor and talk any­way. A pic­ture taken af­ter 8 p.m. cap­tured 460 peo­ple on the dance floor.  

“There is some sig­nif­i­cance in the amount of peo­ple who came out,” Cooke said. “And the kind of di­rec­tion that it pro­vides for cam­pus ac­tiv­i­ties and the cam­pus in gen­eral…for fu­ture cam­pus events. 

De­spite hours of set­ting up, the clean-up op­er­a­tion took only an hour and a half. Many peo­ple con­tributed to the tear­ing down of the event, in­clud­ing coun­cil mem­bers. 

But the dance did not come with­out hid­den ex­penses. The com­pany that pro­vided the light­ing and sound equip­ment charged ad­di­tional fees for equip­ment trans­porta­tion. 

The orig­i­nal bud­get of $1500 in­creased to ap­prox­i­mately $3000. Cooke said the coun­cil re­ceived $1000 from an anony­mous donor to cover some costs. The coun­cil’s dis­cre­tionary bud­get cov­ered the re­main­ing cost. 

The coun­cil is cur­rently fundrais­ing to cover the funds they used from the dis­cre­tionary bud­get. 

“We’re work­ing on see­ing if we can get a donor for…some­where be­tween $600 to $1500 dol­lars to fill in the gaps,” Cooke said.