By Elliott Nace | Staff Writer
Attractions, free food and spring weather filled Fountain Mall during the university’s annual Diadeloso event on Tuesday. The student and partner-staffed event sported state fair games, goat yoga and a concert at Waco Hall featuring Joshua Bassett.
Many of the featured activities were staffed by members of the Baylor Chamber of Commerce. According to Elk Grove, Calif., senior and Chamber of Commerce President Adam Davis, the Texas State Fair inspired the carnival theme of this year’s Diadeloso and led to the Chamber of Commerce painting its own state fair attractions for the event.
“There’s reverse balloon popping, which is fun, and some other carnival [attractions] that you would see at the state fair, like the Jacob’s Ladder,” he said. “But the idea of it was that we wanted to sort of emulate what you would experience going to the Texas State Fair and put our own Baylor twist on it.”
Victoria junior Kloe Cowan, a member of the Baylor Chamber of Commerce, helped plan the whole event but also ran both the balloon-popping and boat racing stations.
“Every year, we kind of get stationed differently,” Cowan said. “This year, I helped with the campus decorations — the big ‘Dia’ letters and the backdrops.”
Davis mentioned that Diadeloso is an opportunity for the Chamber of Commerce to think big and put on the best event it can, a goal that is supported by the lack of constraints on attractions for the event.
“There’s so much freedom to do whatever we want with it,” he said. “Unlike Homecoming or Family Weekend that are a lot more structured events, with Dia the administration basically says, ‘Hey, here’s a budget, plan some fun things for people to do.’”
Davis said last year’s Diadeloso, which was held during the solar eclipse, set a precedent that the Chamber of Commerce tried to match this year with the Joshua Bassett concert.
Miami senior and Chamber of Commerce member Jazz Fontanez worked with two other students on the committee planning the event’s attractions. She said that a perk of staffing Diadeloso is watching everyone else on campus take in the spectacle of the event.
“It’s definitely one of the more free planning events where you can kind of do whatever your mind thinks of,” she said. “I got to live out my dream of painting a carnival.”
According to Cowan, who has staffed Diadeloso every year since she arrived at Baylor, her role provides her with a special kind of fulfillment.
“It’s a cool way to give back to the Baylor community and see everyone just having a good time,” she said.
Davis said seeing the event come together was a blast because of its one-of-a-kind way of bringing fun to campus.
“I particularly love seeing the community and faculty getting to meet their families — having their kids that I’ve seen get to have fun here,” he said. “There’s not a lot of events that are specifically catered to students, but also very much so younger kids from the community or from faculty and their families. But that’s what I love about Dia.”
