Written by Mitch Friesenborg // Photo by Madison Meyer
Men’s social club Galaxy, which just celebrated its 75th anniversary on Homecoming weekend, participated in Club Week for the first time in decades. After being inactive for years, former Galaxy club members, now sponsors, approached junior Luke Phyllis to revive the club last year.
“The sponsors found me and asked me to try and restart the club,” Phyllis, who is currently the club’s president, said. “I worked with them very closely, and then all the baseball players jumped on board and that was really what carried us through to this semester and where we’re sitting now.”
The club is currently comprised of many baseball players and are a major reason why the club came back with such success. Being athletes, the baseball team had little time for any other on-campus activities, and current members on the baseball team thought it would be a great way to get involved on campus. What started with two members, Galaxy became a club with 45 members overnight.
“The baseball players, they banded together, and they had told me that they wanted a club of their own,” Phyllis said. “They were either gonna start one or jump into one that was dying, and then they heard me talking about Galaxy, and they were like, ‘Hey, we’re in,’ and I was like, ‘Perfect.’”
With their numbers ballooning and the narratives around the club’s revival, Galaxy had a great pitch for incoming freshmen to join their club during this year’s recruitment process.
“I’m trying to push the club to be better and bigger and a very close-knit group of men,” Phyllis said. “There’s a fair bit of challenges that come along with that, but you know what, we’ll work through it. We’ll be alright.”
One of the members who joined last semester participated in his first Club Week and gave his reason for joining Galaxy.
“I’m friends with a lot of the baseball players,” sophomore Nic Fraraccio said. “I go to a lot of their games, so I figured it’d be a nice experience to be in a club with them, and also I just really like the laid back environment, and I just think it’s really enjoyable to be a part of it.”
One of the club’s queens, senior McKenna Oliver, also had a message for freshmen joining Galaxy.
“I think it’s awesome that a bunch of them helped bring it back, but our goal is to have it just be like any other club on campus, like anyone can join,” Oliver said. “I would never want anyone to feel like they can’t be a part of Galaxy because they’re not an athlete. … It’s like a club for everyone, not just select people, and I think that’s what they’re really excited about: again it’s just like getting to meet other people on campus and getting to be a part of the other side of college, other than the athlete life.”
