Photo Essay: Tap Night Unmasked
Known as one of the most exciting nights on campus, Tap Night for fall 2020 commenced Thursday evening. Due to COVID-19 regulations, multiple clubs on campus took their own approach to keep social distancing guidelines in effect, while welcoming in new tap members for the semester.
All photos by Shay Maclean.
“As alumni, some of us work here at the university, and as former members of Sigma, we are very proud of the girls and how hard they’ve worked to adhere to all of the social distancing measures,” said Head Sponsor of Sigma Nu Sigma, Lisa Guyselman. “Our biggest tradition is really 1 Corinthians 13 - so as long as they’re honoring our club scripture, they’re free to make this as safe as possible. Love never fails and we know that we can find a way to make this experience available to everyone in the safest possible way,” said Guyselman.
“I personally support [carrying tradition] but it’s definitely strange being here. We can’t get too close and we have to stay on these marks… Chi is different,” said junior and member of Alpha Gamma Chi, John Arthur. “As of right now we don’t have anything [for induction] scheduled because we don’t want to break the guidelines- we’re trying to be as safe as possible. So once the governor opens up the guidelines, we’ll go on to induction,” said Arthur.
“We’re trying to make the most of this situation and trying to give the new guys the fullest experience possible,” said junior and member of Upsilon Xi, Jack Medlin. “These guidelines are here for a purpose, but we definitely have to adapt our induction to it. It took a lot of deliberation and prayer,” said Medlin. “We figured, ‘We have guys that want to be in the club, so let’s get them in.’”
“Even though we were told that things would look different, our club was always determined that no matter what, if we had to change things and make things different, we wanted to do our best to try and tap girls, whatever that looked like,” said junior Sigma Nu Sigma member, Emily Whatley. “So for us, we always saw that we would persevere through this for the tap.”
“When [Sigma] was first presented with the challenge of how to social distance and still have their traditional Tap Night, they came to me and said ‘is this possible?’ And my thoughts are: we believe in you as young women, we believe in you and your creativity and we support you however you can creatively think about it, as long as administration approves,” said Guyselman. “We’re gonna back you and support you 100%. And that’s what they’ve done - they made it happen.”
