Homecoming unites Bobcats across generations

Generations of Bobcats — current students and alumni alike — gathered in Bozeman last week for Homecoming 2025. The week celebrated MSU’s culture and history with football pride, spirited parade floats and all-around good times. 

In the library archives, the earliest photos of Homecoming are from 1947. They capture football spectators, the marching band and a homecoming float with that years’ royalty riding on top. These same traditions have been carried on through generations, and Bobcats still come back to participate in them.

“I mean, homecoming is a great term for this week. So many people coming back together and reconnecting and expressing again their commitment to some of the things that make MSU great,” said MSU President Brock Tessman at an alumni event with Sigma Chi on Friday.  

This year, Homecoming Week kicked off on Monday, Sept. 22 with the ‘Go ‘Cats’ lighting at the Hedges dormitories. A Tuesday concert rang in this year’s homecoming theme, Montana Mixtape: Bobcats on the Beat. 

Traditional events like the Lighting of the M and the Homecoming Parade helped remind alumni of the past, and a drone show put on by the Associated Students of MSU (ASMSU) lit up the sky on Friday night. 

ASMSU President Lenny Triem was at the Lighting of the M on Wednesday. “We got up there just in time to see the crescent moon dipping below the horizon,” he said. “We had blue lights this year, and it was beautiful looking across the lights and over the city.”

Friday morning featured a charity golf tournament. MSU’s Pi Kappa Alpha chapter sponsored the event in honor of Coleman Clarke, a student and fraternity member who passed away over the summer. 

“We’ve decided the best way to support [Clarke] is with purpose and the brotherhood that he so dearly loved,” said Interfraternal Council (IFC) President Sean Newsome.

According to him, money raised at the tournament went towards the Blake Caumissar Memorial Fund which supports mental health initiatives for young adults. “We're putting [the money] towards something that directly impacts [Clarke’s's] legacy,” Newsome said. 

The traditional pep rally on Main Street was followed by a new homecoming event: a concert now a drone show at Dyche Field. “There’s a huge crowd, lots of people enjoying music and playing games in the field,” said Sophie Mayers, a mechanical engineering major. “The vibe is spectacular.”

Local band Retrograde took the stage before the drone show. “They’re the best. They have crazy range. Retrograde is the band to go to,” said freshman attendee Josh Heineken, a mechanical engineering major.

The drone show kicked off at 9 p.m. with images of skiing bobcats and slashed Griz teddy bears zipping through the night sky. “[It was] one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen. I don’t know who came up with that, but they deserve maybe the Nobel Peace Prize,” Heineken said. 

Big Sky Droneworks — the organization that programmed the drones — worked with ASMSU Vice President Finn Growney to bring the performance to life, according to Triem. 

Saturday featured the main events of the week, calling home MSU alumni, future Bobcats and current students for the Homecoming Parade and football game. People flocked downtown that morning to watch floats and funky vehicles — many of which represented MSU’s local organizations and businesses — cruise down Main Street.  

“The fact that a lot of alumni come back for [Saturday], I think that’s a good way for them to engage with the present University but also remember a lot of the great things about when they went to college,” Triem said. 

Jim Dolan and Paul Fanshawe, who graduated from MSU in 1970, were at the parade. Dolan is the artist behind some of the metal sculptures on campus — author Walt Whitman and former president Abraham Lincoln to name a couple. 

While watching the parade, Dolan reflected on his own homecoming shenanigans. “I look back when [Fanshawe] and I were in the parade back in the ‘60s,” he said. “I mean, one year we had a 20-member all-kazoo band, and for the parade we put all 28 people in the Ford van. We put everybody in — on top, inside — the whole bit,” Dolan said. 

The alum also shared some advice for students: “Don’t let school interfere with your education.”

Pam Walz from the class of 1985 also returned for Saturday’s festivities. She said she is a third-generation Bobcat whose children also graduated from MSU.

Walz remembered watching her sister in the Homecoming Parade in the ‘80s, trying to wrangle some unruly long johns. “She literally spent the whole parade — as she was trying to flip her big, giant flag around — pulling her long johns up,” Walz said. “It was spectacular, especially if you may or may not have had a Bloody Mary that morning.” 

“I have a whole bunch of stories that I 100 percent cannot share, but I'll just emphasize how great the social life has always been in Bozeman,” Walz said. 

One homecoming tradition has started to phase out in recent years: the float wars, which take place before Saturday’s parade down Main. 

The float wars are a Greek life tradition in which fraternities attempt to sabotage one another’s homecoming floats. According to some fraternity members, however, the wars almost led to the floats’ cancellation this year. 

In an interview on Friday, Sigma Chi member and IFC Communications Officer Braxon Dimaggio spoke about the tradition. “At night, [the pledges] have to guard the float. It’s just a frat war. Unfortunately, many floats have already been attacked. There’s a bunch of eggs and stuff on some floats — it’s pretty bad.” 

According to Newsome, in 2023, the IFC and the Dean of Students Office decided to abolish the float wars, though certain fraternity members ignored the decision.

“Sometimes there are [those] one to two percent of bad actors in fraternities, and sometimes they do not like to follow the rules,” Newsome said. According to him, any more participation in the float wars would have resulted in sanctions. 

In the end, the Greek life floats made it to the parade, and MSU sisters and brothers rode high above the Bozeman streets. 

The tailgate and football game are other longstanding traditions that drew large crowds on Saturday. Tailgate tents — complete with stuffed bobcats, autograph-plastered footballs and cheese-dripping schnitzel — housed hordes of game-hungry Bobcat fans. 

Former Bobcat football player and alum John Knokey compared his time on the team —  from 2000 to 2004 — to today. “[MSU] and the Bozeman community are hand-in-hand. Back then, it was like, we have Bozeman and then we also have the football program, but now it’s absolutely ingrained as one,” he said.

Knokey recalled his first year on the team, where the ‘Cats went the majority of the season without winning a single game. “We rallied around one another, we beat the Griz, we went to the playoffs and the history of [MSU] has been bright ever since,” he said.

Despite the addition of new events, Homecoming 2025 remained true to its goal of demonstrating MSU pride. Past, current and future generations of Bobcats gathered to celebrate their connection to the University they love.  

“There’s a little bit of Bozeman and [MSU] everywhere, and so it’s really neat when those people that are doing good things and are living elsewhere can come back and share stories,” Knokey said.