Featured Image: VWU student athletes gather at the Tassos Paphites Soccer Complex on April 23 for the 2023 FinFest. Andrea Hoover-Erbig | Courtesy
This year’s FinFest, which took place on April 23 at Foster Field in the Tassos Paphites Soccer Complex, brought together student athletes to participate in field day games. Notable parts of the events were food, snowcones, popcorn, a 360 camera and a DJ. Athletes were split up into teams which represented 15 different countries while the coaches were together on one team.
FinFest organizer VWU Men’s Soccer Assistant Coach Shane Kohler offered insight into the exciting event this year. Kohler said organizers “tried to choose a mixture of more classic field day games, and current popular activities. Three-legged race, potato sack race, a water balloon toss are all games the majority of people played at some point growing up.”
He said they wanted to include newer games such as Spikeball and Kan Jam as well. Organizers reached out to the Student Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC) and took into consideration the feedback from last year. Kohler explained that since SAAC is ultimately participating in the event, they wanted to make their experience the best it could be. So they “asked [SAAC] which games from last year could be replaced, and they were great with the answers they provided,” Kohler said.
One main goal of FinFest, according to Kohler, is to have the different athletic teams working together in order to get to know each other better. For example, he said, “Instead of just having the Men’s Basketball team vs the Baseball team, we do our best to intermingle every athletic program. We took about 2-3 members from each athletic team and divided them up evenly to form about 15 different teams.”
Overall, Kohler was pleased with the outcome of the event. “There aren’t too many drastic changes from last year’s event, as we received a lot of positive feedback,” Kohler said. “We altered a few of the games after talking with the Student Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC). We are really excited to host another great event for our student athletes!”
The event was set up in a bracket style with the two final teams being Spain and Jamaica, who faced off in the final event of Tug of War. Jamaica won the game against Spain, which led to Jamaica facing off against VWU coaches. Ultimately, the coaches won.
By Kamal Womack
krwomack@vwu.edu
