Zona Zoo completed its third card stunt in three years in the UA student section at Saturday’s football game.
“”It had been attempted two times before at Homecoming last year and then I forget which game two years ago, but they have done it twice,”” said Courtney Bensen, a marketing senior and Zona Zoo team member. “”Apparently there was something wrong with how they set it up so they weren’t actually able to execute them. We wanted to try and do it again this year.””
This year, near the end of the first quarter, Zona Zoo members began passing out blue and white colored cards to students sitting in the center section of the student section.
Students were then supposed to hold them up and determine which color to hold by following instructions that were taped to their seat before the game started.
There were five specific stunts, each of which said something different, Bensen said.
“”The first one said ‘Go,’ the second said ‘Cats’ and then the third, fourth and fifth said ‘U, of, A’ with the big block A at the end,”” she said. Unfortunately, during the event, the word “”cats”” was misspelled: “”ctas.””
Alex Murphy-Barriga, a mathematics sophomore who sat in the student section, said he thought the stunt was a good idea but could have been organized better.
“”No one really knew what to do and people were holding up the wrong color at the wrong time … (but) it was an interesting idea,”” Murphy said.
Bensen said that at least four of the cards messages were relatively easy to determine by looking up at the scoreboard.
“”Cats was the only one that I struggled to see on the Jumbotron.”” Bensen said. “”The ones that did show up showed up really well, so I was happy with it.””
From the stands, Murphy said that he had a harder time making out what it said.
“”It was kind of hard to see what it was, but you could kind of make out the U of A thing,”” Murphy said. “”It was pretty cool. I just think if it was organized better it would have been cooler and looked a lot better, probably.””
One thing that Bensen said could have worked more smoothly was how the cards were collected after the stunt, as many of them ended up becoming paper airplanes.
“”There is nothing we really can do once we hand them over to the students. It is their prerogative whether they want to cooperate and hand them back or not,”” Bensen said. “”For the most part we did get 80 to 85 percent of the cards back, so it is kind of something that we can’t really control.””
Bensen said that she was very pleased with the final results and it was something Zona Zoo will look to reproduce in the future.
“”Right now I think we are just looking at once a year, but if it becomes something that the students get really excited about and ends up going really, really well, then we might do it a couple times a year and … see where it goes,”” Bensen said.