WKU Homecoming set to help celebrate Veterans Day

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. – While the Hilltopper football team gets ready to take the field on Saturday, the community is getting ready to celebrate Homecoming and an important holiday at the same time.

“This year’s homecoming theme: Big Red, White and Blue obviously ties into Veterans Day… when we knew homecoming and Veterans Day were going to coincide, we knew we had to lean into the theme a little bit to not only celebrate WKU and the spirit that exists on campus, but also honor and pay respects to our veterans as well,” Anthony McAdoo, Director of the WKU Alumni Association says.

The parade will head down College Street and make its way to Fountain Square Park, where businesses have already begun decorating for the day.

“All of our downtown businesses that are around the square are doing a window decorating contest to match the Big Red, White and Blue theme that perfectly matches with Veterans Day as well. We’ve got the window decorating contest going on on Friday, and we have all these beautiful flags set up around Fountain Square as well,” Telia Butler, Downtown Development Coordinator for the City of Bowling Green says.

The next day, the city of Bowling Green plans to celebrate its veterans with the annual Veterans Day Parade.

“With the Veterans Day parade happening back to back from the homecoming parade… to our knowledge, there has not been back to back parade days in downtown Bowling Green in our history… as a way to celebrate Homecoming one day and thank our veterans the next day, that’s a very nostalgic Americana, positive uplifting thing,” Butler says.

WKU is honored to be able to pair Homecoming with the Veterans Day Parade for the first time.

“For us, it was an opportunity to celebrate both WKU and our veterans, but also WKU’s tie with our military friendly status. There’s a lot that goes on on campus every day with our military student services, our Veterans Upward-bound, Textbooks for Troops, our ROTC program… that’s given us an extra opportunity to celebrate those things over the course of homecoming,” McAdoo says.