Like many universities, Fordham suspended its sports programs in 1943. “The war, lack of students, and the advent of the Army [have]curtailed all extra-curricular activities,” the 1944 Maroon yearbook staff wrote.

In June 1943, the gym and much of campus were given over to the U.S. War Department, which selected Fordham to host two units of the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP). For nearly a year, Fordham Jesuits and lay professors taught upward of 800 troops pre-engineering and languages. The goal of the program was to meet the wartime need for technically trained junior officers and soldiers. The troops in training slept in the gym, and at the program’s height, cafeteria workers were dishing out more than 2,750 meals from 4 a.m. to midnight every day.

Many of the undergraduate students who remained on campus—including basketball star Bob Mullens—were members of Fordham’s ROTC program and would soon leave Rose Hill for active duty. The ASTP troops were a much-needed infusion of life and revenue for Fordham, which had seen a precipitous decline in enrollment, from 8,100 in October 1940 to 3,086 four years later.

With “most of the athletes gone” to enlist in the military by their senior year, the 1944 Maroon editors decided to revisit earlier victories, including the basketball team’s “drive for national fame” in 1943, when Mullens led the Rams to their first National Invitation Tournament berth and became the third Fordham basketball player to earn All-America honors. That “last court team to don the Maroon colors until peace [is] restored … proved to be on par with the ‘greats’ of the past,” they wrote.

RELATED STORY: Celebrating 100 Years of Rose Hill Gym: A Thrilling Legacy

Among Fordham’s many rich traditions, the ringing of the Victory Bell outside the Rose Hill Gym holds special significance. The bell tolls at the start of every commencement, and it signals hard-fought wins in Fordham sports venues. In May 2019, the University’s Office of Military and Veterans’ Services instituted a bell-ringing ceremony to honor veterans in the graduating class.

Here’s your chance to brush up on the roots of these historic traditions.

Original use: The bell was a fixture on the Japanese aircraft carrier Junyo during World War II.

How it came to Fordham: Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, who had received an honorary degree from the University in 1944, presented the bell to Fordham in 1946 and dedicated it as a memorial to “Our Dear Young Dead of World War II.”

First campus bellringer: U.S. President Harry S. Truman, visiting Fordham on May 11, 1946, to mark the University’s centenary under a New York state charter, was the first person to ring the bell in its new home on campus. Fordham presented Truman with an honorary Doctor of Laws degree, and in a speech, the president stressed the need to support higher education to “master the science of human relationships” and build peace throughout the world.

VIDEO: Watch this short 2016 piece on the history of the Fordham Victory Bell.

RELATED STORY: Celebrating 100 Years of Rose Hill Gym: A Thrilling Legacy

As the historic gym enters its second century, it has a newfound identity—and momentum.

“How about Rose Thrill, man!” After raucous home crowds seemed to will the men’s basketball team to a pair of impressive victories in January 2023, head coach Keith Urgo started a postgame press conference with those words. The name stuck.

As the gym enters its second century, Ram fans have high hopes. The recently completed Cura Personalis fundraising campaign focused new attention on athletics, especially basketball. Donors contributed to the New Era Fund, which supports the women’s and men’s teams. And a rejuvenated student section fired up players and fans alike.

Here are three recent wins for Fordham basketball.

A Record Three-Year Run

The men’s team achieved its highest three-year win total since joining the Atlantic 10 in 1995. The highlight? Going 25-8 in 2022–2023, just one win shy of the famed 1970–1971 team’s 26-3 record.

An Atlantic-10 Surge

The Rams reached the semifinals of the A-10 Tournament at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center in 2023. “It was great,” recalled Nikhil Mehta, a fan who graduated that year. “On the way to the games, you had ‘let’s go Fordham!’ chants ringing throughout the [subway] cars.”

Revived Ram Spirit

With slogans like “It’s a great day to be a Ram!” and shout-outs to fans for their support, Urgo has helped build a spirited culture on and off the court. And the men’s team’s 2022–2023 performance led to a 113% rise in ticket sales last season.

For Sam Jones, a Fordham senior who helps run an Instagram page to publicize games and other events, the energy around athletics has been “an absolute dream.”

“It changes your college experience—just to be walking around campus and hear, ‘Oh, are you going to the basketball game?’” he said. “I love it.”

RELATED STORY: Celebrating 100 Years of Rose Hill Gym: A Thrilling Legacy

From Vin Scully to Mike Breen and beyond, WFUV and the Rose Hill Gym have nurtured some of New York City’s and the nation’s top sportscasters.

Bang! Basketball fans across the country know Hall of Fame broadcaster Mike Breen’s signature on-air call. But how many know that it started from the stands at the Rose Hill Gym?

“When a Fordham player made a shot, I would scream, ‘Bang!’” the 1983 grad once told a reporter. “I tried it on air as a student a couple of times. I said, ‘This doesn’t work.’ … Then I went back to it when I started doing TV and felt it was a nice, concise [phrase] in a big moment. You say a one-syllable word, and the crowd rises and you don’t have to scream over it. One easy word. I’m from the Vin Scully … school of conciseness.”

Vin Scully, of course, was the 1949 Fordham grad widely regarded as the best baseball broadcaster of all time. But Scully, who died in 2022 at age 94, was also among the first to call a basketball game for WFUV, Fordham’s public media station. By January of his senior year, he was doing it from a new booth in the Rose Hill Gym’s east balcony, The Fordham Ram reported.

Since those days, WFUV and the gym have been a launchpad for many grads in sports media. Breen is the voice of the New York Knicks on MSG Network and the lead broadcaster for ABC and ESPN’s national coverage of the NBA. Chris Carrino, GABELLI ’92, is the longtime radio voice of the Brooklyn Nets.

There’s also CBS Sports broadcaster Spero Dedes, FCRH ’01; ESPN host Tony Reali, FCRH ’00; and Ryan Ruocco, FCRH ’08, a lead play-by-play announcer for pro and college basketball games on ESPN who has called the WNBA Finals since 2013.

“It’s this simple,” Ruocco once told this magazine. “If I did not go to Fordham and work at WFUV, I would not be here doing what I’m doing today. Period.”

RELATED STORY: Celebrating 100 Years of Rose Hill Gym: A Thrilling Legacy

I sat beside my parents on the crowded gym floor, impressed by what the president, Joseph A. O’Hare, S.J., said about students who make the city their classroom. And I thought about basketball, too. As a Knicks fan, I knew that broadcaster John Andariese was a Fordham grad. I’d learn much later that his Fordham coach was Johnny Bach, the master of the “Doberman defense” who helped lead Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls to three straight NBA titles in the early 1990s.

As the Rose Hill Gym turns 100 this season, it’s hard to imagine a better exemplar of its spirit than Bach, a Fordham grad of grit and class.

Bach was a decorated World War II veteran who bookended his Navy service with studies at Fordham. He enrolled in 1942, returned in 1947, and graduated the following year with a degree in economics. That final year, he starred on the men’s basketball team, earning team MVP honors.

He also encountered a 34-year-old Vince Lombardi, FCRH ’37, in the gym. The Fordham grad and future NFL legend was coaching the freshman basketball team at the time. At the start of the season, he instructed his players to stand along the baseline, Bach recalled. “Fordham University and God have ordained me to coach you,” Lombardi told them, “and I want every one of you who is willing to be coached … to step across that line.” It was the kind of affirmation that Bach carried with him throughout his life, Bulls head coach Phil Jackson once said—an affirmation about being coached and being part of a team.

After graduating from Fordham in 1948, Bach played for the Boston Celtics before returning to Rose Hill in 1950 as head coach. It wasn’t a career change he took lightly.

“I think everyone who goes into coaching must have some apprehension,” he once told a reporter, “because it’s far more than basketball. It’s philosophy and discipline. It has so many demands.”

For 18 seasons, he coached the basketball Rams to more wins than anyone else in Fordham history. And he remained an enthusiastic coach and educator for 56 years, the final 25 in the NBA. He had a gift for making the game “come alive in terms that [everyone] fully understands,” to quote a 1993 Fordham Magazine profile of him.

A Proud Product of a Fordham Jesuit Education

After Bach died in 2016, Mary Sweeney Bach told a reporter that her late husband’s Fordham education was key to his success as a coach.

“He was very proud of being the product of a Jesuit education because he believed in the importance of … being spiritually honest, intellectually honest. He believed in the importance of education. That’s part of what made him the kind of coach he was,” she said. “It wasn’t just rah rah, go get ’em. He was so much into teaching the basics, the fundamentals, the values; it was the basics of life as well as the basics of basketball.”

She also said that her husband admired how Michael Jordan “elevated the people around him” on the court. Likewise, Bach left an indelible mark on countless athletes, including Jordan, who described him as a mentor, friend, and “truly one of the greatest basketball minds of all time.”

What connects Bach not only to our story about the gym but also to the profiles of alumni changemakers and to Fordham’s “Best for Vets” reputation is his passion for teamwork and for building up those around him.

“When you love what you do,” he once told this magazine, “it really isn’t a job.”

B.A. Van Sise was driving his young nephew to the Cherokee Heritage Center in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, several years ago when he heard Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson on the radio. The Moana actor was reflecting on his Samoan heritage. For years he had a hole in his heart, he said, because he didn’t speak the language of his maternal ancestors.

“I suddenly had this moment of epiphany,” Van Sise recalled.

Since graduating from Fordham College at Lincoln Center in 2005, Van Sise has worked as a photojournalist, artist, and author, but he studied linguistics at the University, and his degree is in both visual arts and modern languages. He took courses in Italian and Russian, and he also speaks French, German, and Ladino, an endangered language he learned from his mother and maternal grandfather growing up in New York.

“I realized I wanted to explore language in America,” he said. “​​What does American language look like?”

It’s more diverse than you might think.

The Resilience of America’s Endangered Languages

English has been dominant on the North American continent for centuries, subsuming other languages, “turning them upside down and shaking their pockets for loose vocabulary,” Van Sise said. And yet, “against unspeakable odds”—despite colonial forces, disease, cultural displacement, migration, and remixing—hundreds of Indigenous and diasporic languages exist in America.

Much of these languages’ variety and complexity is on brilliant display in Van Sise’s latest book, On the National Language: The Poetry of America’s Endangered Tongues, and in a solo exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles through March 2.

The book features speakers, learners, and revitalizers of more than 70 languages in the United States. From Afro-Seminole Creole to Zuni, each language featured includes a brief cultural summary. And each portrait is paired with a single, often hard-to-translate word designed to inspire Van Sise’s visual approach and “show off the poetry inherent in each language,” he said. “Fundamentally, it is not an ethnicity project. It’s about the poetry of languages.”

In that sense, it’s a sequel of sorts to Van Sise’s first book, Children of Grass: A Portrait of American Poetry (2019), and it bears a kinship to his portraits and essays about Holocaust survivors in Invited to Life: Finding Hope After the Holocaust (2023). Like Holocaust survivors he met, endangered language speakers and revitalizers are “obsessed with the future,” Van Sise said, “the future of their stories, their legacies, their own families, and the people who come after them.”

Van Sise initially thought he might photograph “the last speakers” of various languages, “a really colonialist idea that I’m slightly embarrassed of,” he said. But he ultimately focused on the many people and groups working to revitalize—and in some cases resurrect—these languages. He traveled to 48 states with pivotal support from the Philip and Edith Leonian Trust, he said, and worked with dozens of Indigenous and diasporic cultural organizations, Native tribes and nations, and the Tribal Trust Foundation.

And while he photographed a Bukhari speaker and a Judeo-Spanish singer in his hometown of New York City, most locations weren’t so easy to reach. “Endangered languages really do best in places that are remote and where communities can still speak to each other,” he said.

Striving for Balance

Laura Tohe, former poet laureate of the Navajo Nation, met Van Sise near the Superstition Mountains, two hours east of Phoenix. She had a turquoise dress made specifically for the photo session, and “God gave me the sky” to match, Van Sise said. His playful sense of humor is on display in the way he and Tohe depicted hózhó, or striving for balance, “an extremely famous concept in Diné,” the Navajo language, he said.

Whimsy is also evident in Van Sise’s portrait of former Houma chief Kirby Verret in Gibson, Louisiana. Verret and an alligator teamed up to show off the Houma French word onirique, or something that comes from a dream.

Van Sise spent nearly a week with Amish community member Sylvan Esh before Esh agreed to work with Van Sise on the photograph. Part of getting to know Esh included waking up at 4 a.m. several days in a row to milk his cows, Van Sise said. The Pennsylvania Dutch concept he ultimately depicted with Esh, dæafe, or to have permission to do something, is “extremely, unbelievably important in the culture,” Van Sise said.

A Movement to Revive Lost Languages

Amber Hayward, a member of the Puyallup tribe in Tacoma, Washington, chose the Lushootseed word ʔux̌ʷəlč, or the sound of saltwater waves washing onto the beach. Lushootseed once numbered 12,000 speakers along the Puget Sound “before going extinct approximately twenty years ago,” Van Sise writes. As director of the Puyallup language program, Hayward has aided its rebirth. It’s just one of several languages featured in the book that boast healthy revitalization programs.

Another is the Kalispel language, represented by Jessie Isadore. She recommended the word cn̓paʔqcín, or the dawn comes toward me, said Van Sise, who explained that Kalispel is one of several languages historically spoken in what is now Montana and Washington state that make no distinction between nouns and verbs. “The whole thing just becomes one idea,” he said. “There’s something really lovely about that.”

Nahuatl is one of few languages highlighted in the book that is not spoken primarily in the U.S., but Van Sise could not resist the Aztec language’s centuries-old tradition of making as big a poem as possible with a single compound word. He and Los Angeles–based folkloric dancer Citlali Arvizu (pictured at the top of the story) chose tixochicitlalcuecuepocatimani, or, you are bursting into bloom all over with stars like flowers.

Working with people like Arvizu to create “visual poems” in these languages is more than an artful way to document linguistic diversity. For Van Sise, the goal is to raise awareness and inspire further education and preservation.

“I can’t do much to make the Haida language revitalization program more robust,” he said, picking just one example. “But I can provide the sizzle for the steak.”

8 Uncommon Words to Spark Your Interest in Endangered Languages

B.A. Van Sise’s book On the National Language features conceptual portraits of more than 70 speakers, learners, and revitalizers of endangered languages in the U.S. Each image is inspired by a single word in the speaker’s language, one that isn’t always so easy to translate into English. He hopes readers might “find one impossible word, and want to learn another and another.” Here are eight.

tekariho:ken
between two worlds
Mohawk

kapará
worse things have happened
Judeo-Spanish, or Ladino

puppyshow
showing off behavior
Afro-Seminole Creole

amonati
something you hold and keep safe for others
Bukhari

koyaanisqatsi
nature out of balance
Hopi

ma’goddai
feeling when the blood rises that makes you act both violently and lovingly
Chamorro

opyêninetêhi
my heart is taking its time
Sauk

uŋkupelo
we are coming home
Lakota

An Essay by Afrika Owes, Fordham Law School Class of 2024

When I returned to jail this past summer, I lost a bet I made with a correction officer in 2011—that I would never set foot in Rikers again. Back then, I also wrote in my journal that I’d become a lawyer. I kept that pledge. As I walked through those familiar halls, this time as an invited speaker, I recalled the number they once gave me: ‍6001100148. That number stripped away who I was. It was a constant reminder that I was just a body, a statistic, a faceless soul among hundreds in a system designed to forget me. But that number couldn’t erase my name, my identity, my aspirations.

I returned to Rikers in July to talk with young women at the Rose M. Singer Center, where I had been incarcerated at 17. In their eyes I saw the same fear, the same sadness, and the same yearning for hope that mine had reflected 13 years earlier. I had been one of them, convinced that a bright future wasn’t something I deserved. But now I stood before them not as ‍6001100148 but as a woman who had fought like hell to reclaim her name and her power.

Less than 10 miles from where I served my six-month sentence, Fordham Law School was integral in that battle. Drawn to the University by the support and leadership of the Black Law Students Association, whose president went so far as helping me with my law school application, I soon found mentors who believed in me and opportunities that led to my success.

At Rikers that day, I told the women the truth: The system wasn’t built to rehabilitate them. It would try to break them. I had been where they were—lost, angry, ashamed, and hungry for love. My life felt like a series of small deaths. Every court date that got pushed back, every visit that never came, every letter that went unanswered. I feared I would never be seen as anything more than that number.

But what I didn’t know then, and what I needed them to understand, was that resilience—the kind that carries you through—isn’t found in the world around you. You build it within yourself, piece by piece. As I studied for the GED and SAT exams in my cell, I wasn’t just chasing a way out; I was keeping hope alive.

Hope was something no one could take from me, and it’s something I urged the women to hold on to as well. Though fragile, their hope was their power. Together with strength and purpose, it could propel them forward.

I shared the darkest parts of my journey: The nights I cried alone in my cell. The moments I thought my life was over. How after my release, the world didn’t suddenly open its arms to me. Bank accounts were closed, job offers rescinded. I was rejected again and again.

But every time someone told me “no,” I told myself “yes.” Every time the world tried to reduce me to my mistakes, I dared to believe that I was more than my past. And with each step forward, I built a new life—a life that no one ever expected me to have.

As I spoke, I watched their faces. Some were stoic, guarded, skeptical. I get it—hope is dangerous when the world has only ever let you down. One young woman, tears in her eyes, stood up and shared that she had passed her GED. She hadn’t thought it was a big deal—until that day. She realized how powerful that achievement truly was. In her, I saw my younger self—the girl who once thought she had nothing left, but now, standing before them as a lawyer, knew that she was unstoppable.

As I departed, I didn’t feel lighter. I felt the weight of the women I met, the lives they still had to live, the battles they would face. But I also felt hope. I made a promise—to myself, to those women, and to every girl who has ever been buried by the weight of the world: That world may feel impossible, but its soil is where you’ll grow.

Even within the coldest of concrete of Rikers Island, a rose will find its way to the light. Hope, like a rose breaking through concrete, defies the odds. It grows where it shouldn’t. And once it blooms, it transforms everything around it—quietly, relentlessly, and without permission.

—Afrika Owes is a 2024 Fordham Law graduate and a first-year law clerk in the tax practice group at Davis Polk & Wardwell.

Campus dining has changed.

The renovated Marketplace opened in the McShane Campus Center at Rose Hill on September 3, unveiling brand-new menus, food stations, and a variety of seating options to create a dramatically improved dining experience. The renovation was supported in part by a $5 million grant from New York state.

Here’s a taste of what students are experiencing.

Vegan and Vegetarian Options

The first thing visitors encounter is the vegetarian and vegan station, which sets the tone for the new Marketplace. By using fresh ingredients that have a low impact on the environment, the station is designed to help Fordham lower its carbon footprint.

“Students are really gravitating towards more plant-based options,” said Deming Yaun, Fordham’s dining contract liaison. “It’s a statement of freshness that the station is making that is carried through the whole facility.”

Space for Everyone

Seating arrangements are diverse: booths, tall tables, long tables, and benches are situated throughout, welcoming everyone from single diners looking to work through lunch to teams and other big groups gathering for a communal meal. One dining room can be sectioned off for private gatherings. Altogether, the space can accommodate nearly 800 diners.

Chef’s Table

The chef’s table adds a bit of culinary theater to the dining hall, offering a front-row seat to cooking demonstrations and a chance to order from a seasonal menu featuring special tastings.

Restaurant Row

Diners can choose from the Iron Skillet, featuring made-to-order meals all day; Trattoria Italian Kitchen, with hot-from-the-oven pizza; Ignite grill; and Sweet Nothings, with house-made desserts.

Halal Station

New York City is known for its halal carts, and now Rams can get an authentic version of this street food without leaving campus. “It’s nice that it’s going to be an everyday option,” said Andres Perez, a Fordham senior and a pitcher on the baseball team whose go-to halal meal is chicken and rice with a salad. The Marketplace also offers kosher meals upon request.

Sustainable Eating

Several meals in the Marketplace are certified climate-friendly by the World Resources Institute. They’re marked with a badge so students can easily identify items that have a low environmental impact.

When we emptied out the house, you wanted to keep everything.
Books no one was ever going to read jammed into a storage unit
with the handbags we could never afford and the photos of everyone
alive. You left for Saigon with his sweaters and a suitcase full of letters
you asked to be buried with. The ink fades where your fingers trace the chin
of each line and you’re beginning to forget what some words mean
in English: epic, majestic, covenant, eternal. What will time make of us?
Years brackish with partial truths, I could almost float on what I don’t
say: I want to get better before I see you again. If I go first, who will help you
feed the spirits? When I call, it’s tomorrow on your side of the world,
the sea at a simmer, the wind readying its fists. You tell me Dì Sáu came back
a swallowtail and helped you make the bed. You’ve been buying lottery tickets.
I know this means you’re afraid to die. This, our only language: omens, unlucky
numbers, butterfly hauntings, tales of women who die weeping and come back
as trees. You make me promise to keep the couch he died on, remind me to give
Pippa the pearls when you’re gone. I look at the oak outside my window,
remember you crouched in the dirt, gloved to the elbows, raining seeds
from your fingers. Someday, you said, this will all be yours.

—Theo LeGro, FCLC ’10

About this Poem

I wanted to explore how grief tethers us together and makes us alone, and,
whether immediate or ancestral, is eternal, inescapable, a burden, and in so
being, ultimately a form of love.

About the Author

Theo LeGro is a queer Vietnamese-American poet and Kundiman fellow whose work has earned nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets. Their work appears or will appear in Blood Orange Review, Brooklyn Poets, diode, Honey Literary, Plume, The Offing, Raleigh Review, and others. They live in Brooklyn with a cat named Vinny.

This poem was originally published in Brooklyn Poets.

Whether she’s exploring the life and legacy of a feminist sex educator (The Disappearance of Shere Hite) or the right-to-die legal battles surrounding Terri Schiavo (Between Life & Death), a common thread binds together many of the films she’s produced.

“They each unmask underlying power structures in society through deeply personal narratives, and question how we can do better to create a more equal and more just world,” said Ferdinando, a 2004 Fordham graduate and the executive producer of NBC News Studios.

She began working on her latest film—The Sing Sing Chronicles—in 2016. That’s when she visited Jon-Adrian “JJ” Velazquez at the maximum-security Sing Sing Correctional Facility, about 30 miles north of Midtown Manhattan, where he’d been serving 25 years to life for a murder he didn’t commit.

“He was a father desperate to get home to his children, and even though there were many glaring issues in his case, he’d exhausted all of his appeals,” Ferdinando said. “I connected with JJ immediately, and it was clear there was an important story to tell.”

Eight years and more than 1,000 hours of archival footage later, The Sing Sing Chronicles—a four-part docuseries—is bringing that story to light. The series premiered at the DOC NYC film festival on November 16, and it aired on MSNBC the following weekend. (It’s available for streaming on NBC’s website.)

The Sing Sing Chronicles highlights the bond NBC News investigative producer Dan Slepian formed with Velazquez over two decades—an unlikely connection that led to the exoneration of six men who were wrongfully convicted, including Velazquez, who was granted clemency in 2021 and finally exonerated on September 30 of this year. The docuseries is built on more than 20 years of investigative reporting by Slepian, who also recently authored a book recounting the experience.

As showrunner and executive producer of the series, Ferdinando said she’s extremely proud to be a part of a project detailing the complications of the criminal legal system and how a wrongful conviction can impact generations.

Launching a Media Career at WFUV

The award-winning journalist and filmmaker credits her success to the principles of journalism she learned as an undergraduate at Fordham, where she double majored in communication and media studies and Spanish language and literature. While completing her studies, she worked as an anchor, producer, reporter, and eventually news manager at WFUV, Fordham’s public media station.

“That radio station changed my life,” said the Staten Island native who chose Fordham after becoming familiar with the Lincoln Center campus while attending Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts.

She did her first news broadcasts on WFUV shows Mixed Bag with 1967 Fordham grad Pete Fornatale and Vin Scelsa’s Idiot’s Delight, where she continued working five years after graduating.

With 20 years under her belt at NBC, Ferdinando recently returned to the University for “Fordham to the Frontlines: Alumni Journeys in News & Media.” The event, sponsored by the Career Center, featured several other successful grads and brought them together with students—an experience she described as “really heartening.”

“Career paths are unpredictable,” Ferdinando said. “If you don’t put yourself out there and say what you want to be doing, it’s hard to bring that to fruition. We really encouraged them to hone in on what they want to be doing and go after it.”

—Erica Scalise, FCRH ’20

The warm, sun-soaked day began early for attendees who took part in the 13th Annual 5K Ram Run, a three-lap race around campus. By 11 a.m., grads and families began to pack the tents on Edwards Parade for pregame food and drinks. Face painters and caricature artists worked the kid-friendly family tent, and as game time approached, the Fordham cheerleaders and pep band helped lead fans to Moglia Stadium. On the field, despite a strong effort, the football Rams lost to Stony Brook 27-21, breaking a two-year streak of dramatic, come-from-behind victories at Homecoming. 

This year featured a strong turnout from Lincoln Center students, including many who helped kick off the weekend at the President’s Ball on Friday evening.  The annual formal dance, held under the Homecoming tent, drew more than 1,500 students. Meanwhile, nearly 500 recent grads gathered for dinner, dancing, and cocktails on the annual young alumni yacht cruise around lower Manhattan.

Save the date: Homecoming 2025 will be held on Saturday, Oct. 18, when the Rams take on the Dartmouth College Big Green at Rose Hill.