Homecoming week may have been last week, but there was still one more homecoming event to do yesterday before it was all said and done. The Brigham Young University True Blue Foam event was pushed back a week due to weather, but that didn’t prevent a massive turnout. This event, which was put on by the Brigham Young University Student Association, has an interesting history.
Anthony Holt, BYUSA Executive Director, said, “BYU True Blue Foam started originally as ‘BYU True Blue Flag Football’ about 15-20 years ago, and they used to play flag football here on Helaman Fields in all this blue foam. As the years went on, it developed, it passed through ‘True Blue Tug-of-War’ and finally, we’ve come to the product we have today which is ‘True Blue Foam.'”
The event was not only big at BYU, it also caught attention elsewhere. “Another cool thing is that the event went viral last year,” Holt said. “It ended up getting on Reddit, Buzzfeed, and a couple of those other major social media news sources where it ended up, and we’ve had countless phone calls each month asking us how we do it.”
This event was no small feat, and it took a lot of time and hard work to put together. Holt continued to discuss exactly what went into the preparation. “We started with preparations back in May, and we’ve been putting together teams, we’ve been having councils and committees gone together, whether it was designing this shirt that I’m wearing right here or making sure we had the grounds crew coming and setting up our blue foam and setting up all of our slides. We’ve probably got 40 to 50 people who will be volunteering over the course of the event, and my guess is close to 1000 man hours.”
This event wouldn’t have been possible without the students, and it’s their love for the event that has kept it going. Much like the changes that have been made in the past, BYUSA hopes the True Blue Foam event will continue to grow. BYUSA Executive Director Holt had one final thought on the event. “We hope over the years, it continues developing as it becomes a crown jewel of BYU tradition.”
