Every homecoming season twelve students are chosen to serve on the Homecoming Court and represent NDSU’s students at the homecoming parade and football game. This year Katelyn Duchscher was one of the students to receive this honor. “NDSU means a lot to me and I’m so happy to be a face for them and to show the community what a great organization I’m in,” she said.
Every NDSU student organization can choose two candidates who they want to nominate for Homecoming Court. Student organizations include fraternities, sororities, clubs and groups like Campus Attractions. Students who are nominated fill out an application and have an interview before a committee, which narrows down the number of applicants to twenty-five. These twenty-five students become the interim Homecoming Court. Some of the organizations represented by the Court this year include Pride Alliance, HDFS Club, National Residence Hall Honorary and Saddle and Sirloin, as well as various fraternities and sororities.
Duchscher was nominated by the Sigma Alpha Professional Agricultural Sorority, which encourages leadership for women in agriculture. “I was so honored to be nominated for homecoming royalty because that signifies that my organization believes in me and has the faith in me to represent us, but also to represent NDSU beyond that,” she said.
Next, the interim Court is announced and voting is opened to students the week before homecoming. Each voter chooses their top two students, and the twelve students with the most votes become the Homecoming Court. They are introduced at the ice cream social held on the Monday of Homecoming Week to kick off homecoming events.
On the Thursday of Homecoming Week, the Homecoming Court appears at the Blue Key Honor Society show. There was a big change in how the Court was elected this year: rather than having students vote for the top two students out of twelve candidates, they voted for twelve candidates to be chosen from the twenty-five members of the interim Court.
In the last few years NDSU moved from having a Homecoming King and Queen to having two members of Homecoming Royalty, but as of this year they changed the process further to have students simply vote in twelve members of the court who are to be honored equally. “Since NDSU isn’t doing the top two students anymore, we all just walked out on stage at the Blue Key ceremony and they introduced us and kind of recognized us for being on the court,” said Duchscher.
After the election, the Homecoming Court walks in the Homecoming Parade and sits together at the football game. “The fun thing about being on the Court is that you might not know a lot of the people going into it, but we get to spend a lot of time together throughout the week,” said Duchscher. “We had the best time getting to know each other, become closer friends and just share our excitement for a university we all love.”
Homecoming Court members also got to interact with alumni and donors throughout the week. Duchscher said homecoming was a great opportunity for donors to see the massive turnout at the football game and how passionate students, community members and alumni are about NDSU. “We made sure to do a lot of networking and let people know how grateful we were for their support for NDSU.”