UMD Snowball Fight 2014

By Kathryn Klett on February 15, 2014

It was war.

The battlefield: the vast expanse before McKeldin Library, the snow churned and muddy, wet with the blood of countless plants trampled underfoot. The combatants: hundreds of College Park residents, eyes afire with the freedom of a snow day, arms raised in victory as snowballs found their discriminant marks. This was the McKeldin Snowball Fight – this was the undertaking of a courageous enterprise, where students boldly dared to tread where none had gone before in the year of 2014. It was a glorious endeavor.

And it all started on Facebook.

“UMD Mall Snowball Fight 2014” became an event on social media around midnight on Feb. 13, courtesy of Brett Potter, an aerospace engineering major at the University of Maryland. By 1:30 p.m., the fight that was supposed to start at 2 p.m. was already starting to get into full swing, and was being diligently documented in photo and video.

Not all snowballs made were devoted to such a militant purpose. Observers could find three-foot-high snowballs being rolled out across the battlefield, as students brought snowmen to life and built a towering “Snowtudo.” A small but dedicated group spent hours packing snow into plastic crates as they built a large igloo. The aftermath of the event was a second enormous fight, later in the evening, and it just kept going on, and on, and on.

The packs of warring students strewn across the McKeldin Mall had been gathered, first online, and then in the real world, as a part of a marketing ploy on part of Potter, a co-founder of MindForge Designs, a 3D printing company. It was a testament to the power of Facebook as word of the UMD Snowball Fight of 2014 went beyond the Internet, students passing the message on to their peers offline, and finally amassing a huge shapeless army, each soldier’s allegiance due only to himself.

There were more students than anyone had thought would show up, and eventually people just stopped trying to count. Students lined up in the rain for a massive group picture were told to post their attendance on the Facebook page. Immediately following, the photographers found themselves bombarded from behind by a renegade snowball brigade.

“I heard someone say there were 267 people here…I’ve been out here for two hours and didn’t even realize it was raining – I think this has been the best part of my college experience so far!” said sophomore Ted Kuligowski.

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