Pillow Fight Among Coaches
by: Lindsay Pieper

            Frank Beamer and Seth Greenberg finally duked it out Sunday afternoon.  So did 950 other people.  And while no records were broken, all the participants in a giant pillow fight on Virginia Tech’s Drill Field managed to raise $2,059 for hurricane relief while having more than a little fun.

            Armed with a colorful variety of pillows, 954 people from the Blacksburg area joined an attempt to break the Guinness World Record for the largest pillow fight.

            Organized by Tech’s Beta Theta Pi fraternity, in association with Tech’s Kappa Delta sorority, the 10-minute-long pillow fight raised $2,059 for the Hurricane Katrina effort, and fell 1,819 people short of the 2,773 world record.

            “We fell below the record, but it was an admirable first attempt,” said Steve Brylski, a member of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity and the event organizer.  “The field we had roped off would have been too small for the number, it was already packed.”

            The field was packed in part because of the Tech celebrities supporting the event.  Head football coach Frank Beamer and the head basketball coach Seth Greenberg made cameos and divided the participants into two teams:  Beamer’s Brawlers and the Greenberg Gang.

            Beamer advised his Brawler’s to “fight ‘til the end,” and Greenberg ordered his Gang to “hit ‘em high, hit ‘em low, hit ‘em hard and hit ‘em often.”

            After Beamer and Greenberg exchanged the first hits, “Enter Sandman” erupted over the loudspeakers, officially beginning the fight.  Within seconds, the team cohesion collapsed and all the participants found themselves in a massive free-for-all.

            “It got a little rowdy out there.  I had to keep my head on a swivel and watch my back,” said Daniel Heaton, a senior management EIT major at Tech.

            After the 10 minutes allotted for fighting elapsed, the exhausted participants threw down their pillows. 

            “I was really surprised that everyone stopped fighting when we told them to,” Brylski said.  “Everything just ran smoothly.  It was a lot of fun for a good cause.”

            Prior to the fight, members of Beta Theta Pi and Kappa Delta registered all the participants, searching pillows and collecting donations.  All participants were charged a minimum of one dollar to support the Hurricane Katrina effort.

            According to Brylski, Beta Theta Pi and Kappa Delta originally planned on donating the money to the Red Cross, but realized the $250,000 goal of the Hokies United.  Hokies United, a student-organized volunteer effort, challenged the Tech community to raise $250,000 for Hurricane Katrina relief by Dec. 1. 

            All together, the pillow fight raised $3,059 before expenses.  The participants donated $1,509, while the remainder came from outside donations and sponsorships. 

            Brylski explained that he got the idea for a giant pillow fight off of CNN.com years ago, and was waiting for an opportunity to hold the event.

            “I never had a reason to do it before, so when Hurricane Katrina hit, I thought it be a nice way to raise some money for people,” he said.

            Officially, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, a group from Dodgeville, Wis., holds the record with 2,773 participants.  A group from the University at Albany, however, claims to have beaten the record in April with 3,648 participants. 

            Regardless of the numbers, Brylski thinks Tech will try again for the record.

            “We’ll do this again, either in spring or fall of 2006.  It honestly looked like people were just having a lot of fun with it all and that’s exactly what I wanted,” he said.