Hi all,

We’re excited to announce a Raceday Rebroadcast Livestream on 4/18 at noon EST! The event will feature live commentary, clips of races and hijinks of years past, and a few live events such as an alumni panel!

You can submit any heat you’d like to see at the link here!

Any segment or regular part of the broadcast (yes, even Squirrel Cam) we are thinking about incorporating, but I can’t share too many details yet. There will be a detailed schedule to come, but roughly speaking, the first two hours will be races and accompanying segments, and the final hour and a half will be an awards ceremony, an alumni panel like what we do at Design Competition, and closing remarks.

We’re hoping to get the community very involved through the chat, live video, and through submissions of all kinds. If you have any ideas, feel free to share in the comments or on Discord!

Lastly, thanks to those who have attended our small scale livestreams these past couple Fridays, they’ve been very helpful to try out new things.

Hi all,

This is the first follow-up update from the Town Hall (and consequently, housekeeping after the cancellation of Raceday). If you weren’t able to make it to the Town Hall, you can take a listen here.

1. Membership and benefits — Complete: All memberships and benefits from this year will rather apply to next year. There have been no concerns brought to us at this point regarding the delivery or postponement of rewards so we will consider this complete.
   
2. Consolation print — In progress: We have decided to send out a poster designed by Gregg Valley to Silver and above BAA members. There will be an email later this week to solicit your address if you would like to receive a poster, free of charge. You can see the design here and order additional copies, including high quality signed ones. The BAA print design previewed earlier will be used for future merchandise.
   
3. Budget — In progress: There are several large items which we still expect to spend funds and work on, so this item may be the last to close. I don’t expect to provide a substantial update on this until approximately July when the fiscal year closes and we can concretely say what our funding situation is. It is still accurate at this time that we (Sweepstakes, the BAA, and CMU staff) have spent very little of the Raceday budget, however some budget will not roll over and some items can be completed now for next year, so spending will be in constant flux.
   
4. Homecoming — Completed until Fall 2020: With feedback from the staff, we have learned that there is very little space in the Homecoming 2020 schedule for new events. The BAA will continue expanding support for Homecoming but as a separate smaller initiative rather than under the Centennial collaboration.
   
5. New content including livestream — In Progress: Chute the Sh!t has hit a technical snag this week and episodes may be delayed slightly. Also to report, we have completed the sound check and test stream for the livestream. All that’s left to do is collect videos from you all! We will write a post soon (this weekend?) about that.
   
6. Elections — In Progress: Positions up for re-election have been identified and we are working on the descriptions and ballot forms. Elections are currently scheduled near the end of April.
   
7. Gifts for students — In Progress: A poll has been sent to current students to collect ideas for what they would like. A few teams have responded already and the poll closes on Friday. Then next week we will meet to decide what to make! The ideas from the BAA were not unanimously received by the current students in the Centennial Committee so we wanted to seek more input before going forward.

Hi all,

We are holding a town hall meeting this Sunday at 2pm over Zoom, which you can download here ahead of time if you’d like. A recording will be made available after the meeting and follow-up posts written as necessary. The agenda will be roughly as follows, with time for as many questions and tangents as people want.

1. Review progress on the 7 items outlined in my previous post regarding Raceday Cancellation, see my post here.
   1. Membership and benefits
   2. Consolation print
   3. Budget
   4. Homecoming
   5. New content including livestream
   6. Elections
   7. Gifts for students
2. Updates on Chute the Sh!t and History of Buggy concerning adjusted release schedule
3. Questions for the audience:
   1. How should we recognize the seniors and/or students in general?
   2. How should we expand Homecoming next year?
   3. Anything we missed or could look in to?

Hi everyone,

The BAA, in collaboration with Will Weiner, is excited to announce the debut of Chute the Sh!t, a weekly podcast series about Buggy. You can take a listen on most of your favorite platforms or refer to the list here! Currently we are scheduled to have seven episodes, released weekly on Sundays, with maybe a few more if there’s enough interest. For now the plan is to locate discussion on each episode on our Discord channel (#podcasts) which you can join here if you’d like. But as always, feel free to comment here as well!

The first episode is an hour-long interview with the illustrious Tom Wood, official Buggy Historian and recipient of the first Lifetime Spirit of Buggy award about the history of Buggy and Tom’s story. Stay tuned for the next episode on Sunday!

Hi all,

It is with sadness in my heart I must write to let everyone know that Raceday 2020 has been canceled to maintain public health in the face of COVID-19. Although this is terrible to hear, we are going to do our best to help the students in any way we can and deliver as much relevant content as we can to everyone over the next few months. We are holding a town hall meeting next Sunday, March 22nd at 2pm on the videoconferencing platform Zoom to discuss how we will move forward. A link will be provided here when it is available.

There are several announcements to outline, which we will provide as much information on as we can going forward. We hope to have substantive updates as we communicate with CMU staff for each item during the town hall meeting, which we plan to record and post online as well. Many of the following points will be expanded into their own posts in the coming month.

1. Our hope is to roll over any efforts from 2020 in to 2021. This includes applying membership benefits that were purchased this year to Raceday 2021. We would like to make Raceday 2021 into the amazing event we had planned for Raceday 2020 but need to consult with CMU staff to see what their intent is.
   
2. We are proposing to fulfill the Buggy100 commemorative t-shirt reward on Raceday 2021 and ship all Raceday 2020 BAA members a print of the original design in consolation. This is pending an estimate of the costs of printing and shipping, which we hope to absorb fully.
   
3. We have actually spent very little of the considerable budget for Raceday so far. The budgeting for Carnival comes from many sources so it will take us some time to track down how many are still on-board for next year, but at this time it is clear that most of the budget has been saved. We will outline for everyone roughly where the budget stands during the town hall.
   
4. We expect many people will be able to recoup their travel bookings so far in advance of the event. We are considering whether to expand Homecoming Weekend next year and suggest that as a potential option to change your flight if there is interest. Please comment below on your opinion on looking in to expanding Homecoming 2020, which (my guess) is Oct 16-17th, 2020, based on the Academic Calendar. We would administer bigger events, potentially sponsor a winner for “mini-raceday” or things like this.
   
5. We still have many items of content that are still relevant and hope you will enjoy this year. Chute the Sh!t, a Buggy podcast from the BAA in collaboration with Will Weiner, will be published regularly starting very soon. Also we eagerly await the conclusion of History of Buggy from our own Bryan Arsham! We are currently exploring a Carnival Livestream of past races on Saturday. We could also do a mashup of everyone’s favorite buggy videos which we could solicit in the next couple of weeks.
   
6. Elections will move forward as regularly planned, we’ll get you more information on that in April, with potentially some new positions planned.
   
7. We are looking for ways to support teams through these tough times. We are also considering providing graduating seniors a special consolation gift such as a badge or poster of some kind, in addition to as many exhibition races as we can get in 2021. Let us know if you have any suggestions of things we could do for graduating seniors.