As most social clubs spent club week emerging new members into the culture and traditions of their club, members of men’s club Omega Phi and women’s club Sigma Phi Mu began the week with a blank slate. Old members in the two young clubs found themselves responsible for creating entirely new legacies and traditions as they welcomed in their first classes of new members.
Senior Omega Phi president Stephen Albers, along with senior vice presidents Carter Lowe, Mark Briggs and sophomore Austin Collum, began planning Omega Phi during the spring 2012 semester. Albers said they chose to name the club “Omega Phi” after an old men’s club at Harding by the same name.
“We wanted to create a club that was completely centered on Christ,” Albers said. “A lot of clubs are that way, but we wanted to be a place where the club was not your life, but it was a place where your faith could grow and could be sharpened.”
Omega Phi’s club week consisted of many of the same basic elements that all clubs incorporate into the week, like All-Club Devo and spending time with other clubs, but it also included several unique aspects. Briggs said old members decorated hammers in maroon and gold to pass to their little brothers, symbolizing the message of the club’s verse, Proverbs 27:17; that “as iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.”
“We want this to be around for more than like 10 years, or even 20 years,” Briggs said. “We’re hoping to be able to come back and this still be a stable and very much functional club. One thing that we are trying to instill is that as the first class, this is the foundation. Like we built the foundation, and you are the first pillars to hold this up.”
Sigma Phi Mu joined Omega Phi for a cookout on Tuesday evening, where old and new members of both clubs had the chance to get to know others in a young club. Senior Sigma Phi Mu vice president Ashley Russell said she is glad to have another club in the same situation that her club is in.
“I was really excited,” Russell said. “I think we have a lot in common. We’re both small clubs still but we both want to become big clubs; we both took more new members than we had old members. So I think it’s cool because I’ve been able to bounce some stuff off them and I think we are kind of going through a lot of the same things. It’s really nice.”
Sigma Phi Mu began last year after several of the club’s founding members were approached by the deans about beginning a new club.
“It’s really heartbreaking to see so many girls get turned away,” Russell said. “So we decided, ‘Hey, why don’t we go ahead and do it?'”
Russell said Sigma Phi Mu’s club week was primarily focused on welcoming in new members, although it also served to bring old members who did not go through a club week of their own closer together. The club does not currently have any major traditions for the week, but Russell said the week was about laying a foundation for the club’s future.
“More than anything, we’re just trying to lay a good foundation,” Russell said. “Next year, who knows, the things we do this week maybe aren’t going to be tradition. But if we can know that our first club week was done well and that God was the center of it, then I think we will grow stronger and stronger and we will become a larger club.”
