The Cal Poly Rose Float team was ecstatic when they received a text that read they won the sweepstakes, the top-honored award at the 137th annual Rose Parade. Cal Poly Rose Float President Aubrey Goings said the team couldn’t believe their float got the parade’s top award.
Each year, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and Cal Poly Pomona collaborate to build a rose float. This year, their “Jungle Jumpstart” float won the distinguished Sweepstakes Award for the first time after participating for the last 77 years.
“We’d never won that before and it’s been decades since a self-built, not professional builder won,” Goings said. “We were so overjoyed and hugging each other, and still pouring rain, but at that moment we forgot about the rain.”
During past Rose Parades, the floats that typically win the Sweepstakes Award were corporate company floats built by professional float designers. To Vice President Stephanie Yeakle, winning felt like an impossible reality for a student-made float. Many students within the program made bets to shave their beards if they won, thinking it was unachievable.
“So it was just surreal. I’ve never cried happy tears more in my life. It was genuinely one of the best moments of my life,” Yeakle said. “And so many people in our team have to shave their beards now.”
The magic in teamwork
The Rose Parade’s theme this year, “The Magic in Teamwork,” helped inspire the layout of Cal Poly’s float. Featuring an oversized robot within the rainforest being brought back to life with the help from the animals, the story of the float shows the teamwork of technology and nature intertwining.
“They’re helping each other out, showing the symbiosis between nature and technology,” Goings said. “We just really thought that represented who we are as a program but also who we are as a group of people really excited to build something together and show the world.”
The Cal Poly SLO and Cal Poly Pomona campuses have worked together on the float since the universities first entered into the parade. Throughout the process of the floats’ creation its members would travel between campuses on weekends to get the job done.
“We are the embodiment of teamwork across multiple campuses, a bunch of different departments, different backgrounds,” Construction Manager and Operations Chair Ryan Newton said.
When planning the float’s design, the team knew they wanted to “dream big,” Newton said, and combine large scale objects while still remaining below 16 feet in order to fit under the 17-foot bridge during the Rose Parade. The float itself had three different mechanisms, which presented more limitations and required coordination between the different departments in the club.
“These elements incorporate a lot of challenges with design and construction, and having to collaborate,” Goings said. “We had to ensure the float was still visually appealing while having all these complicated large mechanisms inside.”
The road to the top
The team faced some challenges sourcing materials for the float. Due to tariffs and many California flower farms closing, attaining materials like tropical flowers at an affordable price became difficult.
“We had to do a lot of outreach this year to coordinate and get more donations,” Goings said. “We coordinated with the Huntington Gardens and LA Arboretum, so we were able to use some of their clippings or potted plants on our float.”
Leading up to the final he program would meet every weekend during the fall to plan and coordinate the floats design and concept. However, the decoration preparation process itself is completed after fall finals finish. Some time off for the holiday means the team only had a few days to complete the decorations moving the float down to Pasadena before the judging happens on Dec. 31.
After finding out the results of the awards, the floats were presented in the Jan. 1 event. Regardless of the rainfall from the previous night, the morning of the parade went smoothly for Cal Poly’s rose float.
Both Goings and Yeakle felt that the program’s achievement represented the dedication and organization from the previous months of work and planning out the float. Taking home the Sweepstakes Award felt like recognition of that work being put in.
“It’s really special to be that group who did it, who opened the door for everyone else able to win that,” Yeakle said.
This article has been updated and featured in the January printed edition of Mustang News. Check out more stories and the full edition here.