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DANVILLE, KY—Prospective students visiting Centre College this summer get to see the sights and learn the lore, but their campus tour has a distinctive twist—or rather spin.
"Instead of the traditional tour," says Bob Nesmith, director of admission, "visiting students play a round of campus Frisbee golf, led by one of our student guides, who stops between holes to tell the Centre story and to talk about the campus."
On one Frisbee Tour on a warm July Friday, Adam Blandford, a 2006 Centre graduate from Middletown, Ohio, tells his alma mater's story with skill and humor, and a slight bit of exaggeration. "I know you all want to come to Centre because they won the national championship in 1921, right?* Well, over there is the C6 H0 (Centre 6, Harvard 0) a student painted on the post office wall right after the game, and it's been there ever since."
Blandford allows that the paint just might have been touched up from time to time, before flinging his Frisbee toward another campus destination.
In Young Hall, Blandford sat his tour group down in a computer-outfitted classroom, and gave some important insights into the nitty-gritty of the Centre experience. "At Centre you can't hide," he tells them. "If you skip even one class, you can count on getting the 'Missed you in class. Is everything all right?' email. Every once in a while you'll see an entire class get up and leave 10 minutes into the period. The professor is taking the class to issue a personal wake up call for a student who's missed two classes in a row."
The prospective students and their parents seemed to enjoy the diversion of the Frisbee golf. "It's fun," says Greg Heaton, who together with his daughter Kate, a rising high school senior, drove to Danville from Madison, Ind. "It's different. None of the other schools we've visited are doing anything like this."
After the tour, students don't walk around empty-handed. They get a Frisbee to keep, a scorecard (designed by campus guide Paul Curtis Foster '08), a Centre pencil (No. 1 lead, of course), and assorted other goodies.
The Frisbee tour departs Old Centre at 11 a.m. through the end of the summer. There’s an info session beforehand in Old Centre's Heritage Room.
For more information, contact the Admission Office at (800) 423-6236 or (859) 238-5350.
* Actually, Centre didn't exactly win the national championship in 1921, there being no agreed-upon ranking system in place at the time, but the Colonels' victory over undefeated and heavily favored Harvard was, and remains, a pretty big deal, and, at 10-0-1, the Praying Colonels have as good a case as any for being Number One in '21.
The New York Times called the C6 H0 game "arguably the upset of the century in college football." ESPN will feature the Praying Colonels as part of Who's No. 1? Biggest College Football Upsets, a show scheduled to air Aug. 28 on ESPN Classic. See here for more information.
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Founded in 1819, Centre College is ranked among the U.S. News top 50 national liberal arts colleges. Centre alumni, known for their nation-leading loyalty in annual financial support, include two U.S. vice presidents and two Supreme Court justices. For more, visit http://www.centre.edu/web/elevatorspeech/
For news archives go to http://www.centre.edu/web/news/newsarchive.html.
Communications Office
Centre College
600 W. Walnut Street
Danville, KY 40422
Public Information Coordinator: Telephone 859-238-5714
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