Two student groups on campus have issued a warning: Beware of flying pumpkins.
The warning is not for ASU students, though. It’s for the effigy of Butch the Cougar from ASU’s homecoming rival, Washington State University.
The History Peer Mentors Program — a group that matches freshman history majors with upper-class history majors — and ambassadors from the College of Liberal Arts will use a nine-foot tall, 600-pound catapult to fling pumpkins at a model of Butch.
The catapult — or more accurately put, the trebuchet — was originally thought of during last year’s homecoming. Paul Bergelin, the vice president of the history program and project manager thought it would be cool to build medieval siege weapons in a display of school spirit.
He said the idea came in a conversation last year between the founder of the history program and himself.
“The founder of History Peer Mentors and I were walking to lunch and having a discussion about medieval siege weapons,” Bergelin said. “One of us suggested, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we built a gigantic siege weapon on campus?’”
From there, Bergelin said he put the idea into action with the first trebuchet the team built last year. He said the reason they chose the trebuchet was for its accuracy and how safe it is compared with other weapons.
This year, the team of ten people spent two weekends and about $900 working on the trebuchet, Bergelin said.
The pumpkins, he said, came from the idea of several pumpkin-flinging competitions around the country this time of the year.
“Groups of really fanatical people get together to shoot pumpkins out of various weapons,” Bergelin said. “Whether it’s a pneumatic howitzer like a cannon or something more traditional like a mangonel, it’s an annual fall tradition that’s been gaining popularity for the last couple years.”
The trebuchet, built from materials from Home Depot, operates by torsion, Bergelin said. The 16-foot swinging arm releases the pumpkins when the counterweight flies down, he said.
As part of the process, the team had to have their project approved by several safety organizations including the Arizona Department of Public Safety, the ASU police department and Student Risk Management.
Representatives from Student Risk Management did not return calls by press time.
Though both this year and last year the history program has built a trebuchet, Robin Valencia, program president, said they would like to move onto other types of weapons.
“We’d like for it to be a type of siege weapon, but we’d like to try different types of catapults,” she said. “We thought about doing a mangonel, which is a type of Roman catapult, but we just didn’t have time.”
Valencia said the program members would like to make the medieval siege on ASU’s homecoming rival’s mascot a future tradition.
Bergelin agreed, saying, “We’re looking to make this event, or similar events like it that involve hurling pumpkins, part of ASU’s homecoming experience.”
Valencia said that with a huge stack of pumpkins being thrown 150 feet away from the target, it should end up being a good show.
“We have a whole pile [of pumpkins] in our storage area so we’ll throw as many as we can in the two hours,” Valencia said. “And hopefully we’ll hit [Butch] a couple times.”
The event will take place Friday at the west SRC field from 1 to 3 p.m.
Reach the reporter at allison.gatlin@asu.edu.
