Football. Parades. A giant corn monument. The University of Iowa’s homecoming remains rooted in tradition after 114 years.
The UI hosted a 5K, held a bingo night, and a blood drive for homecoming, among several other events, all organized by a board of students.
Nicola De Jager, a fourth-year student at the UI and homecoming executive director, encouraged students to get involved with homecoming events and traditions.
“We try to make our events low stakes so people are incentivized to show up to them,” she said. “We really want people to have the most fun they can in a low-pressure environment, to ease the stress of the school year.”
Among these events are traditions that have remained for many years.
Pushing the right buttons
The UI introduced homecoming buttons in 1924, which initially were sold for 10 cents to raise funds for the homecoming
committee.
Over 100 years later, Hawkeyes still wear these buttons to commemorate their return to Iowa City and celebrate the
homecoming tradition.
Featuring UI icons such as former head football coach Hayden Fry, current head football coach Kirk Ferentz, and a whole lot of Herky, these buttons, current and past, are now collector items for Hawkeye fans across the country. De Jager said buttons could be purchased for $4 a piece at tailgates and at the Iowa Hawk Shop leading up to the football game against the University of Indiana Hoosiers on Saturday.
“Our sales have been amazing this year,” she said. “We’re honestly almost out of buttons, but it’s exciting we see people
wearing them.”
Standing tall and proud
With the words “Fight, fight, fight for Iowa” on one side, an old-fashioned Herky, and the homecoming logo on the bottom, this year’s corn monument stood high on the west side of the UI’s Pentacrest.
Designed and built by the UI’s student chapter of the American Society for Civil Engineers, or ASCE, the corn monument marks years of homecoming tradition. The structure launched in 1919 but was put on pause in the mid 1990s.
In 2014, ASCE revamped the corn monument, and it’s been ongoing ever since.
The 2025 construction was led by Fernando Carrillo and Colin Meehan, both UI fourth-year students and society members.
Carrillo and Meehan started designing the monument in April, working on a shorter time frame as homecoming came earlier this year.
They said they went with a classic obelisk design, featuring a four-sided pillar that tapers at the top.
“It was a good way to harken back to older corn monument designs and pay homage to the designs of the past, and also have a simplistic yet good-looking design that could feasibly get done within our build days once the school year got started up again,” Meehan said.
The monument was displayed Sept. 21 and stayed up for homecoming week.
“All the students and faculty can go and visit the monument,” Meehan said. “Then everyone, all the alumni and everyone that wants to come back during homecoming weekend, can stop by and see it, too.”
Let’s pep things up
For almost 30 years, Trisha Brosius, UI class of 1997, along with some of her former cheerleading teammates, have made their way back to Kinnick Stadium for nearly every homecoming since graduating.
Brosius said the environment and the feeling she gets when being down on Duke Slater Field have made returning a no-brainer over the years.
“The overall tradition of Iowa football, being on Melrose [Avenue], being down on the field for ‘Back in Black’ keeps me coming back and wanting to do that with the people that I’ve either cheered with or the people that I’ve met over the years,” she said.
This year, it was a family affair. Brosius has a daughter who was on the UI cheerleading team and graduated in 2024. This was her first year returning for homecoming as an alumna, along with other friends and teammates she has met along the way.
“You pick up right where you left off. That’s the neatest thing,” she said. “No time has passed when you get together. We just feel like we’re back to being in college for a few minutes. We’re all back and nothing changed, except we all have families now.”