Matthew (Moose) Lopez
Managing Editor
Fall Fest, the annual community event hosted by Texas A&M University-San Antonio for almost 15 years, will be no longer.
A&M-San Antonio will be discontinuing Fall Fest in order to prioritize Homecoming events in the spring of 2025.
Fall Fest was a free community festival where student organizations could sell foods and host games, local artists were invited to perform, and carnival rides and attractions were provided for all ages.
A staple of A&M-San Antonio’s fall semester since 2009, this year would have marked the festival’s fifteenth year in operation.
Zeak Naifeh, Associate Vice President and Dean of students at A&M-San Antonio, said Fall Fest was always meant to be a placeholder for future events.
“Fall Fest has now become what Fall Fest was intended [to be],” Naifeh said. “A placeholder for Homecoming.”
The Homecoming event is slated for February of 2025.
Instead of a single-day event, Homecoming will take place over a week.
Naifeh reassured the decision to dismiss Fall Fest wasn’t taken lightly: every campus event is reassessed in a similar way.
“We look at every single event saying: ‘Is it meeting what we’re expecting it to meet? Is it still relevant for what students want? Is there a way to keep it? How do we improve it?’”
Naifeh said one of the contributing factors in the decision to do away with the festival was a return on investment, or lack of, in terms of earnings raised by student organizations.
“Student organizations were not making as much money,” Naifeh said. “Some were making more at other fundraisers, so does it make sense to put money into something that the intended purpose is not meeting?”
The university was always ready to make the decision to alter Fall Fest, it was just a matter of when, Naifeh said. The decision to repurpose the campus festival had been in the works for years, but no official steps had been taken until this summer.
“This has been a conversation over several years,” Naifeh said. “What things did we need to have in place in order to make [Homecoming] a reality?”
And basketball was one of those things the university needed to make the change.
Naifeh said the university felt like this was a “momentum year” with the introduction of the new men’s and women’s basketball teams, and it wanted to capitalize on that feeling to enrich the student experience at A&M-San Antonio.
Students at A&M-San Antonio begin their academic journey with the Jaguar March during New Student Orientation and end with commencement, but the university wanted something to connect students to each other, the community and to alumni, Naifeh said.
“Homecoming is that thing.”
A&M-San Antonio is hosting a tailgating event on Halloween, which Naifeh said is supposed to stoke excitement for the Homecoming event next semester.
“We really want to try a big tailgate event in the fall, so that when we do a big tailgate for homecoming, people are ready and understand what that looks like.”
Brandan Salazar, communications senior and former Jaguar Royalty, was caught off guard when he heard the news about Fall Fest.
“I was initially just very shocked by it like everyone else. Like, ‘oh my gosh what is happening?’” Salazar said.
Salazar first heard the news Aug. 8 during the Student Organization Leadership Developmental Day (SOLDD) event over the summer. It was announced that the university was allocating the funds for Fall Fest in order to “bring something bigger” in the spring semester.
“I feel that students won’t have the pleasure and the joy of experiencing a Fall Festival,” Salazar said. “It kind of takes away the fall nature from students who are experiencing A&M-San Antonio for the first time.”
Salazar said the exiting of Fall Fest will hinder the university’s community outreach to the larger San Antonio area.
“The only way, especially the outside community, will know [A&M- San Antonio] now is specifically just for Festival de Cascarones, and I feel like the Fall Festival really brought people in specifically during the fall time.”
Festival de Cascarones is an official Fiesta event hosted by A&M-San Antonio during the spring.
On Sept. 23, the Student Life Instagram account officially announced “Homecoming Week”: a week full of “fun events, school spirit and timeless memories.”
Psychology major Mariel Talavera was disappointed the Fall Fest was leaving.
“I was looking forward to coming again this semester, because I am a part of different organizations,” Talavera said. “We use [Fall Fest] for fund raising… so it was kind of a loss.”
Talavera serves as secretary for the Psychology club and the Dreamers’ Student Organization.
Although saddened by the departure of Fall Fest, Talavera is intrigued about the new Homecoming events and their potential.
“We’re a small school, so like, hearing [about] all the new stuff we’re getting is good because you can tell the school is really expanding.”
Homecoming Week is scheduled for Feb.17-22., and more details will be available later on in the semester.
