UConn removes lampposts, street signs ahead of Final Four games

On campus, which means the lampposts are coming down, a minimum of till Tuesday.

Workers are additionally eradicating some street signs and rubbish cans throughout the grounds, lest college students get too enthusiastic (or inebriated) and insult themselves or others throughout any post-championship revelries, in keeping with college spokesperson Mike Enright.

“We’re used to the success of the basketball teams. So we’ve kind of got a method down of how we do things,” Enright mentioned. “We learn every time we have a championship situation.”

And college students are conscious of the modifications. Senior Vasilios Tsipouras captured video this week of staff piling lampposts right into a truck, which subsequently racked up greater than 670 thousand views on Instagram.

“You boys gotta take these down, huh?” Tsipouras mentioned within the video. “For safety.”

The college began quickly eradicating lampposts in 2024, a yr after celebrations following the lads’s staff’s first nationwide title underneath Dan Hurley in 2023 received out of hand, Enright mentioned.

That’s to say nothing about UConn’s first males’s title again in 1999. As captured in camcorder movies that circulated on Reddit this week, college students on the time set couches and trash cans ablaze.

Now, the college is getting ready for titles with elevated safety staffing on campus, Enright mentioned. The girls are favored to win a title this weekend, however the males aren’t.

Regardless of who wins, the UConn spokesperson mentioned he did not anticipate this yr’s celebrations, they need to come, being practically as rowdy as three years in the past.

“I think the culture’s changed a little bit,” Enright mentioned. “We’ve definitely seen a change of students’ attitudes, like, ‘I’m not going to tear our campus down.'”

The seniors, he famous, have solely ever been at college throughout a nationwide championship, and had gotten calmer in recent times.

And whereas watch events are deliberate, if mandatory, for the ladies at UConn’s ice rink on Sunday and for the lads on the soccer stadium on Monday, Enright mentioned courses, labs and libraries will proceed uninterrupted.

“That’s what we’re really here for, right?” Enright mentioned.