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Also, in response to MasterP’s charge that they do “next to nothing,” the Greek-affiliated students at WCU are some of the most committed and involved students at WCU, supporting philanthropies, charities, service projects, and other university activities such as Relay For Life, Up ‘Til Dawn, Valley Ballyhoo, Catamount athletics–the list goes on and on. On top of this, their members and alumni are among the greatest financial contributors, not only to their own organizations but to many other clubs and university services as well. I hope you don’t mind me asking, MasterP (and Mr. Panetta, the Northeastern student making utterly incorrect and unfounded claims against WCU’s SGA), but what have you as members of the Gaming Club done to promote your organization’s financial sustainability?
That’s all well and good but the greek organizations are not financially responsible for the success or failure of any of the events you specifically mentioned. Most of the events mentioned are university sponsored events and are not even dependent upon the participation of the greeks. They’re going to have Relay For Life whether WCU is here or not. Up ‘Til Dawn is nothing more than a campus paid-for party, Valley Ballyhoo has nearly every group on campus participate, and even mentioning the athletics tells me you are grasping. If you’re implying the gaming club doesn’t have athletes I’d love to differ and if you’re implying the greeks give donations to the athletic general fund I’d love to see proof.
Also, since the greeks do so much for WCU, please list a few events that greeks planned and paid for entirely by themselves. If you’re going to compare the gaming club LAN events to university sponsored events the greeks participate in you’re comparing apples to oranges, lets stay with the same fruit.
The alumni comments have already been covered to I won’t re-address them but needless to say our alumni, the few there are, give just as much, if not more, of their time and effort to our organization.
If you’d like the gaming club to become completely financially independent then what’s the point of even being apart of SGA at all. All you’ve done in this forum is further strengthen our charges and accusations that the SGA isn’t willing to support the gaming club. We could charge membership fees but that’s not how gaming clubs work. We could have LANs without prizes but no one would go to them, that’s not how LAN events work. Please do some research before telling us that we need to deviate from how NORMAL gaming organizations work.
As for what I give to the organization, I am one of the most active members in the club. I showed up hours before the start of the previous few LAN events to help get everything running. When Shane Baker was in an exam last Saturday he put me in charge of making sure everything was set up when he got out, and it was to the extent possible. I won’t even go into detail about how the UC didn’t give us the number of tables and chairs we needed and how facilities management gave us a powerbox rated for 1/3 of what we asked for.
Don’t even start to question my contributions to the organization. If I charged for my electrical, networking, and management time it would easily have been $300-400 this year alone. If you want to see how active I am in games take a look at my forum signature and take note of all the online clans/organizations I’m a member of. As far as gaming goes, my time is a fairly valuable commodity and the WCU Gaming Club has earned first priority for it. Their community is amoung one of the finest on the internet and I’m proud to call myself a member, even if the SGA won’t support it.
Hell I’ll even tie my name to this…
-Mitchell Pate