Trivia Night debuts as newest UCS event

By Payton Clark, Arts Editor

Trivia Night is the newest popular game night to become a regular UCS event.

Friday March 30, University Concert Series hosted the first annual Trivia Night with live music and free food.

“We knew we wouldn’t be hosting a big concert this semester, so we wanted to make sure we had some kind of event that the whole campus could still be involved in,” senior UCS co-chair Austin Canfield said.

“So after brainstorming, we landed on trivia night for our event.”

Students had the opportunity to form teams and battle against each other for cash prizes.

“This fall in UCS meetings we started thinking about what to do for spring events because we didn’t have any large musical acts coming to campus,” senior Trivia Night host Rae Schrick said.

“Just in discussion amongst the group, we found that a lot of people really enjoyed trivia nights so we decided to make one of our own.”

According to Canfield, it wasn’t difficult to put together despite the fact that there has never been an event like this on campus.

“We made different ‘crews’ from all our UCS members to work on various aspects of the trivia night, and they put in hard work and made it great,” Canfield said.

“We kind of based it off of different trivia nights people had been to before, but also tried to get a little creative ourselves as well.”

Luckily for the members of UCS, their past experiences with trivia nights allowed the event to be planned very quickly.

“It really wasn’t that hard to put it together because a lot of us have gone to different trivia night at restaurants before and so we modeled it off of our own experiences,” Schrick said.

“Since we are university concert series, we really wanted to incorporate music into the night and so that’s when we decided to have students on campus do live music during the questions.”

With more participation than expected, Canfield said that Trivia Night was a huge success.

“It went really well over all,” Canfield said.

“We had such a great turn out, we ended having to put a cap on the number of teams, which we did not expect to have to do.”

Reactions from students who loved the event have so far been in favor of an annual Trivia Night over other events.

“The response from students I heard was overwhelmingly positive,” Canfield said.

“It’s definitely something we’ll consider doing again, and I think most of us would love to see it become an annual thing.”

In the future, UCS intends to follow popular demand and expand Trivia Night into a larger event.

“UCS is definitely interested in continuing it, especially in light of how successful it ended up being,” Schrick said.

“I think we are wanting to make it a little bigger and use a larger venue in the future so more students can participate.”

As he got to witness Trivia Night from an outside perspective, Canfield felt that the fellowship between students was a highlight of the night.

“I think I particularly enjoyed seeing the teams that came work together and laugh together,” Canfield said. “Regardless of how the teams placed, you could tell they were all having a blast. Between the live music, food and fellowship over trivia, it made for a fun, relaxing Friday evening.”

Being a Trivia Night host with fellow UCS member Connelly Rader, as well as a question and live band recruiter, Schrick liked being able to watch Trivia Night unfold.

“I really enjoyed that I got to help facilitate the night and watch students really get worked up about the questions and the competition of it all,” Schrick said. “I think other students really enjoyed that they got to sit with their friends and eat food and listen to their friends play music and it was totally free. It was just a cool thing to do on a Friday night.”

While Trivia Night was one of the last events of the semester, students still have the Senior Encore to look forward to.

“The only other event UCS has this semester is senior encore, where seniors are given a platform to play music for their fellow students one last time,” Canfield said. “We’ll be combining this event with SGA’s block party, so keep an eye out for that near the end of the semester.”