D.L. Coliseum roared with cheers for the bravest dancers as students showed off their best moves Oct. 22 at the annual Lipsync Competition. The event, hosted by the University Programming Board, has always been a huge success as homecoming week’s opening event, and this was no exception.

“It’s tradition,” Ruby Arriaga, coordinator of student activities and UPB advisor, said. “It’s one of the biggest kickoff [events] for homecoming week [where students] get together and cheer for the organizations. There were 10 teams and different organizations and last year there were about six or seven.”

There were four judges present — Alex Collins, coordinator for student organizations and leadership programs, student leadership, and involvement, Tammy Dean, director of student transition services, Tiffany Short, and Sherri Helms, internal outreach specialist. With some 300 students, staff and friends in attendance, 10 groups, a total of 17 organizations, competed for a spot to be in the final three.

Each competing group was task with creating a lipsync routine lining up with the “A Texas Sized” homecoming theme.

Dalton McDonald, pre-med freshman, said, “[The routine playlist] could consist of any artist from Texas or song about Texas which [was] a ton of [options]. That made it hard to narrow down to three or four songs, but once we got the songs the choreography just kind of fell together and we had a lot of fun with it.”

The restrictions made for an interesting mix of mash-ups seeing as the song choices ranged from The Jonas Brothers and ‘Camp Rock’ ballads to classics by Beyoncé, Carrie Underwood, and Usher.

Noah Garcia, nursing senior and contest emcee, said he enjoyed the event and the dance contest was his favorite part.

“All [this] goes into planning well before the semester actually starts,” Garcia said. “We need to start booking events, booking out rooms and all that before the fall semester starts. Before anything gets started [for the semester], homecoming planning is already underway. The last lipsync I wasn’t an emcee… I didn’t participate in organizing it, I wasn’t as hands on, but from what I was able to see we did a really good job of planning. I think we figured out that we need to do a little bit more proactive planning so we can get bigger venues and get all these fun things to start doing for all the students. That’s a pretty big difference, and you could see tonight people were having a pretty good time with it.”

Arriaga said getting everybody together to kick off homecoming week is what it’s all about.