Students from the UW-Madison Lakeshore and Southeast residence halls congregated on opposite sides of Bascom Hill Saturday afternoon to participate in a snowball fight they hoped would go down in history.
The fight, which did not break any world records because of limited participants, lasted for 45 minutes.
Mike Basak, organizer of the snowball fight, said he was not the original planner of the event but took on the project two months ago.
The people who originally started it went to the Chancellor, and she didn't like the idea at first ... Then they backed off and gave it to me,"" he said. ""I made it a little more safe and more organized.""
To make the event safer, Basak asked for help from UW-Madison Student Emergency Medical Services.
According to Emily Anstadt, co-president of SEMS, the team of volunteers did not work under a specified medical director and could not perform typical service practices.
""We can't do a bunch of things we would be able to do if we were a service ... We're just doing anything any good Samaritan would do,"" she said.
Mike Tomcheck, a participant in the fight, required assistance because he was hit in the eye with an ice block while charging.
Eventually, Lakeshore claimed victory over Southeast, driving the residents down Bascom Hill and onto the Humanities building overpass.
""I think Southeast chickened out at the end. I got scared and I started running too,"" Southeast resident Courtney Bauer said.
Organizers of the event hoped to break the world record for the largest snowball fight, set by 3,700 students at Michigan Technological University in 2006.
Although Basak estimated that 2,000 people were present at the fight, other observers thought the numbers were much lower.
Although the record was not broken, Basak said he was happy with the number of people who made it.
""It was definitely a success. It was a much bigger turnout than I had expected actually,"" he said.
Organizers remain optimistic they can draw a larger crowd in the future and said they would like to plan another snowball fight later in the year.
