I only ever attended homecoming events for Slate coverage during my undergraduate years. The campus comes alive with school spirit and camaraderie, with alumni from near and far making the trip back to the Cumberland Valley.

These events were not only important to our campus community but were always fun story assignments.

But now as a few-months-old alumna, I returned to Shippensburg University and saw the events from a different perspective. Perhaps it is the reporter in me, but I still paid attention to small details — gathering the “story,” without an official assignment from an editor.

A cloudy, dreary drizzly morning marked the return of many alumni to campus since before the pandemic. Tents lined the football practice field with Raiders interacting with one another — a hallmark of SU is the community one can find. There were smiling faces, shared meals, hugs and an overarching sense of joy to be back “home.”

I never truly understood this feeling as a student. Why did these people come back year after year?

It really is the sense of community and family. 

Homecoming is a time to see familiar faces, to share life stories and to see how the place we all called home during our transformative years has changed.

For the classes of 2020 and 2021, this homecoming was bittersweet. Shippensburg has set sail from the campus we knew during the past two years. We would be lying if there was not a sense of jealousy and disappointment when we scroll through the social media photos of a seemingly normal campus life that we took for granted before March 2020.

Life at SU does not stop after graduation. There is always a new generation of Raiders entering the community, embarking on their own transformative journey.

We [2020 and 2021 alumni] have reckoned with this idea that our junior and senior years were not the picture-perfect endings to our time at SU. It was not what we all dreamed of, but it is what we overcame and lived through.

But we must remember, blue skies are returning. Just as the cloudy skies began to clear at halftime of Saturday’s football game, the pandemic’s dreary, drizzly clouds will clear, too.

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