Sigmakai’s fraternity brothers were together this spring. Construction workers arrived at work every day with a small fleet of drills and electric saws. It should be noted that the Sigmakai brothers are not known as morning people around the University of Oregon.
“It started a bit rough. I’m not going to lie,” he said. Scott Trumpe, 50, said the longtime chef of Sigma Kai. “For some time it was definitely the boys who opposed the contractor. When the boys finally succumbed to what was happening, it worked.”
At major events such as the World Championships in Athletics in Eugene, Oregon this month, sneakers and apparel companies typically book blocks of luxury hotel rooms to accommodate staff and lease event space for athletes. Entertain. And the client.
However, Eugene is not a busy metropolis with a wide selection of accommodation options like the host cities of the last few years. This is not Berlin in Beijing or Doha in Qatar. It’s a quaint university town with 170,000 people, forcing businesses to compete for available hotel rooms. Others rented small homes near the campus and turned them into conference administration.
Adidas and Puma tried something else. They moved to the Confraternity house.
At ChiPsi Lodge, a few blocks from Hayward Field, PUMA returned home and transformed into a majestic appearance. 85 year old fraternity Home to Puma House with 25 newly painted bedrooms with canal bistro, refurbished basketball court, gaming room and Puma-themed bedroom.
“It was a jigsaw puzzle,” said Mennosnell, event manager at International Orange, an agency that worked with PUMA on the project. “This was not a recurring event in Paris with all the resources available.”
Sigmakai has new furniture, a room dedicated to physiotherapy, a product distribution back office, an ice cream bar, and a café that served watermelon gazpacho from stalkless glassware last afternoon. (Find the barrel and do your best.) Erriyon Knighton, an 18-year-old American sprinter who won the bronze medal at 200 meters on Thursday, seemed to freeze on the sofa in her courtyard. A few other adidas-sponsored athletes were engaged in foosball games.
Ethan Copper, a junior advertising major and president of Sigma Kai, recalled last winter day when he heard someone wanted to do a lot of work there in exchange for a two-week stay in mid-July.
“Wait,” he said. live At our friendship house? “
In recent years, adidas has used Sigma Kai as a hospitality center for various high-profile conferences in Hayward Field. Before they met, the company was getting things done — a little paint here and a little plaster on it. However, the work was minor and visitors never set foot in the upstairs settlement.
At the World Championships, Adidas spent months planning and implementing a major remodeling of a vast building worthy of HGTV’s own time frame.
“We used the money we spent in the hotel room instead,” said Spencernel, head of global sports marketing at Adidas Running, expressing the relatively luxurious atmosphere of the surroundings. “And that’s why it made it so attractive, because we’re going to leave something behind.”
Work at Sigma Kai began at the end of March, early in the spring semester.
“There were certainly some things that needed repair, like holes in the walls,” Copper said.
“It seemed like I woke up every week and something new was happening in my house,” Copper said. The fraternity brothers occasionally felt nostalgic. One day, they saw construction workers go to the backyard and remove some strips of artificial turf that students bought on Craigslist and installed on their own.
“That was all our efforts,” Copper said. “But the new turf looks really nice.”
According to Nell, the long process of refurbishing 40 bedrooms of fraternity became a chess game as the school started still in class. Workers started with a small number of vacant. Once they were repaired, a batch of siblings moved into them so that they could repair their bedroom.
By the end of the school year, some of those refurbished bedrooms were already in various declines. (One resident — and knows who you are — left a fire extinguisher embedded in one of the walls, as if it had been fired like a javelin throw.)
Adidas removed all foreign objects, replaced bedroom doors, assembled new beds, and modernized the bathroom. The Wi-Fi network has also been reviewed. This was a great perk for students and was one of the reasons they put up with so much trouble this spring.
Sander Rodenburg, CIP Marketing Executive who managed the project, said:
But there is a reminder that it’s still a Sigma Kai, not a Four Seasons. For starters, Sigmakai has no central air. Adidas wanted to improve the situation with a fleet of air conditioning units, but the building’s electrical circuits could only accommodate nine of them. At the truck meeting, the air-conditioned room went big. On days when the temperature exceeded 90 degrees, everyone else interacted with the fans.
Neighbors, meanwhile, are obsessed with just painting the exterior walls of the building in dark green.
“They actually came to thank us.” Danny LopezSaid Adidas Senior Manager of Sports Marketing.
I arrived at ChiPsi this month as some fraternity brothers were in the process of moving.
“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of your home,” Snell told them.
Puma chose Chipsi for the most part, Snell said, because it’s in great shape and has already undergone recent refurbishment. But the project still needed a few months of planning. Chi Psi handed over the keys on July 10 and gave Snel and his 20 crew five days to prepare before the start of the World Championships.
“There were few untouched rooms,” said Patrick Herbst, a former Treasury officer at ChiPsi.
According to Snell, one of the more rigorous parts of this process was the “deep clean” of the house, which took nearly three days. It was scrambled towards the end and was crowded with caterers, movers and sound technicians. The home needs to be ready to accommodate about 33 guests, including Puma staff, coaches, agents, and families, as well as 2,500 Puma-branded ice cream treats delivered overnight from Los Angeles. was.
“Take one,” Snell said. “They are very good.”
At the same time, Puma tried not to remove the tipsi from the house. As a result, dozens of annual fraternity composite portraits lined up on the wall remained intact. Norwegian hurdle Karlstenwarholm’s parents stay in the hallway bedroom from a framed composite of the 2015-16 class, in which a handsome puppy named Caleo, who was in charge of the “sorority relationship”, was prominently depicted. did.
“I think that’s the beauty,” Snell said. “We tried to build on the story of the House of Friendship, but we didn’t completely turn it into a revitalization of some kind of sports brand.”
As part of the deal with Puma, fraternity will maintain most of the new furniture while taking advantage of the refurbishment. Herbst, who graduated this spring, said she was envious of the basketball court.
However, some changes may be temporary. At the World Championships, the bathroom on the second floor of Chi Psi is co-educated, with women-only time and urinals full of flowers.
