How Parents Weekend became Pirates Weekend
A loud party, a misheard sentence, and a boat named after the woman who said it.
The calendar has said Parents Weekend since there was a calendar. Ask anyone on campus what weekend it is and they will tell you it is Pirates Weekend, and they will not think they are making a joke, because by now they are not.
One misheard sentence
It began at a party. Filomena — a Jersey girl, and by every account the loudest person in any room she has ever been in — said she wanted to get these parents out of here. The music was loud enough to lose a word in, and her friend Carmelo heard pirates.
That was the whole of it. There was no committee, no vote, no poster campaign. By the end of that night, at a beach house nobody will name on the record, there was a tradition. The university has never once tried to correct the name, which is the most Rockbeach thing about the story.
It stuck because it is also true
A joke only lasts if it is carrying something. Students here like their parents coming — they genuinely do, and they will say so. They also spend one weekend a year watching their own shore get handed back to them by people who booked the good tables six months out and who want to know where the good coffee is.
Both of those are true at the same time. That is why the name has outlived every student who was at the party.
The Filomena
The Student Association runs the weekend. Not Athletics, and not the university — the students organize it, crew it, and own it, and they are fiercely clear about that. They take their parents prisoner. They march them down to Rockbeach Tailgates. And they put them on a boat.
The boat is called the Filomena. It goes out past the lava rocks and it comes back, and what happens on board is not a party but something better: hours on the water with the other families in your child's year. No students aboard. Parents who arrived that morning knowing nobody come back knowing eleven people, and a good number of them are still texting each other at graduation.
The students, meanwhile, have the campus entirely to themselves for an afternoon. They will tell you that is the actual tradition, and they may be right.
Sandy commits
Sandy dresses for it. Eye patch, peg leg, the whole apparatus, worn with the total sincerity of a mascot who is a rock. The Junior Sandys shirt sells itself that weekend, for the simple reason that the parents buying it are the pirates.
Junior Pirates is the same weekend, always. That is deliberate and it has never been otherwise: if you are bringing the younger ones too, you should be able to do it on one trip and actually enjoy the day rather than manage it. There is a full carnival on the boardwalk around all of it, because this is the shore, and a shore town has never needed an excuse.
What we do
Athletics sells the game tickets. That is our part, and we are not going to pretend otherwise — if you ask us about the boat we will point you at the Student Association, who will be delighted, and who know considerably more about it than we do.
Come back for it. Wear the shirt. You have earned the eye patch.