SPRING NEWSLETTER Of the Epsilon Theta Chapter
Featured in this Issue Alpha Class Pi Kapp College for Chapter officers Greek Week Ability Week Alumni Golf Outing Pirate King Senior Sendoff #LiveLikeKainoa
All 20 members of the Alpha Class featured here following their initiation.
The Alpha Class As re-founding fathers of the Epsilon Theta Chapter of Pi Kappa, the class that we brought in this semester was our first class that we brought in. The class of 20 was a diverse class including many different ethnicities, ages and even heights. Our class of 20 was the largest pledge class out of any of the fraternities on campus which was a huge step in establishing our new chapter. These 20 young men, initiates 500-520, that we now call our brothers are all valuable assets to the brotherhood. Many have already joined committees within the brotherhood and they are also involved leaders around campus. One of our newly initiated brothers, Ruben Antunez is the Vice President of the SAB (Student Activities Board) and is also a Peer Advisor on campus. Another one of our newly initiated brothers, Keith Egan, is involved with PSN or Pirate Sports Network and also performs his music regularly around campus as his music is on Spotify and Apple Music. For the rest of our new brothers, the list continues to go on and on as they are involved with things such as Ski and Snow, SASA, the Setonian, Student Government, Peer Advisory, Intramural Sports, Pirate Television and much more. With these involved new brothers, our chapter plans to continue living up to the core Pi Kappa Phi value of Campus Involvement. The future of the Epsilon Theta Chapter is bright and we look forward to bringing in many strong classes to come.
Pi Kapp College for Emerging Leaders
May 15, 2017/Issue III A Spring Newsletter Published by the Epsilon Theta Chapter Of Pi Kappa Phi Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the information contained herein. The Epsilon Theta Chapter of Pi Kappa Phi, nor Pi Kappa Phi Fraternity is liable for errors or omissions. © 2014
On the weekend of January 7th, 10 of our Epsilon Theta brothers traveled to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to attend Pi Kapp College for Chapter Officers. The main purpose of this weekend’s conference was to properly train the elected officers for every chapter in the North Eastern region of the US on how to properly and effectively execute the duties for their executive council position. Throughout the weekend, our brothers learned more than just how to effectively perform their elected roles; they were also able to reach out to brothers from surrounding chapters to network and learn more about the uncommon opportunities that Pi Kappa Phi provides across the nation. For the 10 Epsilon Theta brothers in attendance, it was everyone’s first Pi Kapp College experience and this Pi Kapp College was our first official Pi Kappa Phi Event as a re-chartered chapter. Our Executive Council grew very close together on the long 6 hour venture out to Pittsburg as we made some memorable stops on the way and learned a lot about each-other. With this Pi Kapp College being our first as a chartered chapter we were able to be nationally recognized for multiple awards. The awards we received were for mastery in recruitment as well as in philanthropy and service, we were also honored to be one of the few chapters to be awarded the Master Chapter Award. “Are you boys on a basketball team or something?” –Diner owner when we went entered a diner in Rural Pennsylvania
Spring 2017 Newsletter from the Epsilon Theta Chapter of Pi Kappa Phi | Page 2
Greek Week For our second Greek Week at Seton Hall, we were again able to manage second place after a long week of battling it out with the other Greek Organizations on campus. This year, each organization was paired up with a sorority on campus and was allowed to choose a television show as a theme for the week. We were paired with the lovely sisters of Alpha Gamma Delta and we agreed upon the television show Blue Mountain State. The week started out with a combination of Penny-Wars (where the team with the most pennies won and non-pennies counted against you), Crest Drawing and the one in five nail painting which was when participants had one of their finger nails on each hand painted representing the 1 in 5 people who are sexually assaulted on college campuses every year. We did well on the first day but unfortunately we received a few too many bills instead of pennies setting us back in the first day. The following day however, we kept our heads up when we went into physical competition with the other Greek Orgs as we all competed in Ultimate Frisbee and Soccer. For both, we battled hard and were able to take 4th place for Frisbee and in a low scoring final round, we got 2nd place falling tragically to Phi Kappa Theta and Alpha Sigma Tau (Team Stranger Things). Wednesday of Greek Week was Family Feud. We returned as defending champions to the Jubilee Auditorium but we ended up not going back to back with the Family Feud title. Going into Thursday we were in the running still but we were going to need to pick up some more momentum in the final two days. Thursday’s event was the Greek Talent show where each team had to perform some sort of group talent involving their TV Show theme. Our team decided that since it best fit the Blue Mountain State show that we would do a dance routine where the brothers ran out onto the “field” (the stage) and ran a play as the sisters of Alpha Gamma Delta dressed as cheerleaders and cheered it all on. The performance was even completed with a Gatorade dumping on to Coach/Archon Ravi Shah. This spectacular showing only managed to get us third place which meant we had to show up with big numbers to Relay for Life and sweep the remainder of the competitions. We came out strong and had the best attendance out of all the fraternities gaining us a few points there. We were then able to win the egg in spoon race and one other but the competition was tough. Our saving grace for the night was when the beautiful voices of the sisters of Alpha Gamma Delta won us the singing competition. Overall after the long and hard fought week, we ended up placing second behind team SNL consisting of Alpha Sigma Phi and Zeta Tau Alpha. Going into next year, after nearly tasting victory twice now, first place will absolutely be ours.
ΔΦΕ’s Pirate King
Every spring, the lovely ladies of Delta Phi Epsilon host their talent based competition called Pirate King. In the competition, each Greek organization selects someone to go and represent them in the competition and perform a talent, answer 2 on the spot questions and model 3 outfits. Out of our brothers, 2 competed in the competition; these brothers were Sean Ty who represented Pi Kapp and Eric Kendra who represented the ladies of Alpha Omicron Pi. In the competition, our brothers modeled first in casual wear, second in formal wear, third in beach attire and finally back to casual attire for their talent performance. For the talent segment, Eric Kendra performed a song on guitar and then following him our Brother Sean Ty who was representing us performed “Sunday Morning” as made famous by Maroon 5. Both performances were well applauded by the Audience, but Sean simply stole everyone’s heart as he performed and as the sisters of Delta Phi Epsilon presented the 2017 Pirate King, all of our brother’s jumped for joy when Sean Ty was crowned. Congratulations Sean!
Alumni Golf Outing
On May 19th we had our 14th annual Alumni Golf Outing. The outing was an overall success as we raised $3,500 had 64 golfers registered and 61 of the 64 ended up showing up. The day of the event was perfect as the skies were clear and the temperature hovered around 80 degrees. One of our chapter’s newest graduates, Matty Goldberg was able to golf at the event and undergraduate brothers AJ Tamara, Matt Talarico, Brian Hennel and Joseph Scliabba volunteered at the event by distributing gift bags, arranging prizes and taking pictures from the event. Overall the day was a great way to introduce some of the current brothers to our Alumni Brothers who long anticipated a chartered brotherhood.
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Ability Week This past April, our Philanthropy Committee decided to take on the difficult task of planning out our first ever Ability Week. The week, beginning on April 4, 2017, kicked off with a bake sale. The bake sale overall was successful for the most part, however we struggled a little bit with the baking part (our first few batches were watery and unsellable). We eventually figured out our recipes and made an assortment of brownies, cookies and cupcakes. The energy from the successful bake sale carried over into the next day’s event which was our biggest event, this being Target Soccer. Our Alumni Brother, Amato Galasso, was able to donate his time and company’s equipment for the event and he provided us with a 12’ tall inflatable Velcro soccer target. To fundraise at this event, we charged $2 for one kick and $5 for 3 kicks. As prizes for the kicks, we gave out Monster Energy Drinks to anyone who kicked, (since we had cases of Monster kindly donated to us by Monster) and we also gave out left over baked goods. As for anyone who was able to hit the bullseye, they received a $10 gift card of their choice of either Tito’s or Village Trattoria in South Orange. This event was very successful as it drew a lot of attention being that it towered high above everything else on the green and drew a wide variety of attention. At the event, other Greek Organizations, priests, professors, campus security and even the Dean of Students, Winston Roberts, came out and gave it a kick. This event overall accounted for about $350 of the money we raised in the week. The following day was pie a Pi Kapp. We had previously done this event on its own and since it was a success we combined it with another successful; event which was Push-ups for Pi Kapp. To combined the two, we made a spinning wheel and whenever someone donated money they got to spin the wheel and it would either land on pies or push-ups; additionally we sold custom made Ability Week t-shirts which generated even more for the Ability Experience. The following day we scheduled to have a volleyball tournament on the outside volleyball court by Boland Hall, sadly due to weather many teams backed out so we ended up combing all of the volleyball players who came out into two enormous teams and we still managed to have a great time and sell more shirts. To conclude Ability Week, we ended the week off with a bike-a-thon, the inspiration for the event of course being the Journey of Hope. This event brought brothers and other students together to cycle for 12 hours straight in the Richie Reagan Recreation Center. This event was a great conclusion to a successful, inaugural Ability Week for the Epsilon Theta Chapter. Overall, with the week completed, we contributed a total of $1,000 to the Ability Experience from Ability Week alone as well as $5,500 in grand total for the year. We look forward to raising even more next year from Ability Week and we hope to continue having more philanthropy events than the other Greek Organizations on campus.
Senior Sendoff This year’s graduating senior class is our first class of graduating initiated brothers and they also make up the largest age group in our chapter. These graduating brothers have done a lot for our chapter over the time that we have all been together. Many of these seniors were some of the first brothers to sit on our Executive Council and make important decisions that will now influence our chapter for many years to come. This large senior class is also a very diverse one. The class is made up of everything from business majors to political science majors. These brothers also very involved with a wide assortment of clubs and organizations on campus including SAA, Intramural Sports, Habitat for Humanity, management for the Men’s Basketball team, ΑΚΨ Business Fraternity, ΑΦΩ Service Fraternity, Campus Ministry, Club soccer, Finance Club and many more leadership organizations. To properly send these brothers on their way to either grad school or directly into the real world, we hosted a brunch for them at the Shannon Rose where we were able to all come together and bond one last time. Although not everyone was able to attend, the sendoff was a great way to exchange stories from the senior’s time at Seton Hall and their times in the brotherhood. At the end of Brunch, each of the seniors was able to say a something about what they hope to see happen with the chapter as well as their favorite memory from the fraternity. Again, our seniors were a huge part of getting us to where we are today and they will be missed.
Brothers: Victor Gomez, Matt Anfuso, Dom Cigliano, Karl Butler, Matt Martin, John Galifi, Eric Shack, Anthony Altomare, Zak Gurick, Patrick Sweeney, Alex Sadwick, Pat Morris and Jimmy Slevin at the 2017 Graduation at PNC Bank Arts Center.
Spring 2017 Newsletter from the Epsilon Theta Chapter of Pi Kappa Phi | Page 4
Brotherhood Spotlight: Kainoa Spenser
Letter from the Archon
Our Brother Christian Mason Kainoa Spenser, Chaplain of the Epsilon Theta chapter of Pi Kappa Phi, was recently admitted to a hospital in his hometown of Scottsdale, Arizona. He was suffering from what was believed to be pneumonia. The pneumonia led to lung and kidney failure and while in the hospital; he contracted flesh-eating bacteria. Fortunately, Kainoa is a warrior at heart and battled his way out of “critically unstable” condition to “critically stable”. His fight has been an inspiration for everyone in the fraternity and is nothing short of a miracle.
This year has been beyond an outstanding year for the brothers of the Epsilon Theta Chapter. We chartered our chapter at Seton Hall on November 19th, 2016 and celebrated with our brothers, alumni, and national staff members. This achievement would not have been possible without the guidance and countless hours of help I received from Kainoa Spenser and our chapter advisor, Chris Aldarelli. As my second term as Archon, I knew I had to raise the bar I already set fairly high and establish new goals for the chapter other than receiving our charter. I wanted to mold our chapter into the ideal chapter of fraternity men and create a bond of brotherhood unlike any other. I believe we are far closer to these goals than we were when we began the 2016-2017 year. As a fraternity on campus, we are known to academic scholars as well as well-rounded leaders of our community. In fact, we received the Greek Awards for Innovation and Change and highest GPA on campus. We also were able to find 20 outstanding recruits who were initiated as the Alpha Class this spring, putting our chapter into well over 500 initiates. However, I am more proud of the uncommon brotherhood we have found amongst each other rather than the awards we have received. There is a strong sense of unity which is vital to our success as students, members of our community, leaders, and most importantly, brothers of Pi Kappa Phi. Yours in brotherhood,
Kainoa is one of the nicest and most active members in our chapter and is truly the perfect example of a brother. As previously mentioned, Kainoa is our chapter’s Chaplain and is the second brother to fill this role after chartering. His family is very religious and they say that their son’s revival can only be the result of an incredible amount of prayer. At Seton Hall, Kainoa has been involved with the student government including student led activities and events. His campus involvement is reflected by the amount of support that has come from Seton Hall students. Students from all different corners of Seton Hall have contacted his family, prayed, and liked the Facebook page to receive updates. If you would like to receive updates on Kainoa, visit facebook.com/livelikekainoa
Ravi Shah
Alumni Updates
400 South Orange Ave South Orange, NJ 07079 1 (518) 728-9104 pikappshu@gmail.com | https://www.pkpshu.info/ List of Officers: Ravi Shah, Joseph Papandrea, Zachary Lucainie, Matthew Bagdat, Ryan Drew, Brian Hennel, Kainoa Spenser, Devin Russo, Blaine Spenser, Bryan Pattman
ΕΘ
Coming up for this semester, we will be having a parent’s weekend, a potential Jets’ Game with Alumni and an Alumni Networking event as well as a founder’s day celebration. Parent’s Weekend: October 20-22 Jets’ Game: Date TBD Alumni Networking Event: November 17th Founder’s Day: December 10th