The aroma of freshly cooked wings filled Walnut Place as Kappa Alpha Theta hosted its first wing-eating contest, Wing It, Friday evening.

‘I think it was a huge success,’ said Kerry Kindinger, the philanthropy chair of the Kappa Alpha Theta women’s fraternity chapter at Syracuse University. She said the crowd was so large she couldn’t see over the spectators’ heads.

The proceeds from the event, around $1,300 total, will go to a local Onondaga County branch of Court Appointed Special Advocates, Kindinger said. The group works with abused and neglected children involved in county court. The women’s fraternity’s national branch has had a relationship with CASA for around 50 years, Kindinger said.

A tent set up in Walnut Park covered a row of tables and chairs arranged for the participants. The women’s fraternity played Top 40 hits from its house at 306 Walnut Place. Signs covered the front porch,declaring the event name with the assertion ‘Don’t be a chicken.’ Kappa Alpha Theta house’s chef cooked the approximately 3,000 wings on site.

All participants were required to wear a black shirt bearing the design for Wing It: a skull and cross made of wings instead of bones. The shirts were also available to non-participants for $5. There was no limit to the amount of participants per student organization, but greek contestants were limited to five participants per group, Kindinger said.

The tables under the tent were set with a dish of wings, a cup of water for each participant and extra wings in the middle. In total, there were four rounds of wing-eaters: one group of girls and three groups of guys. A Theta sister stood behind each participant and recorded how many wings he or she ate. At the end, the sisters held up a sheet that had the total number of wings consumed by each competitor.

The girls ate first, taking their seats and anxiously staring at their dish. Ripping the wings apart, they feasted as their friends and the audience cheered them on. About halfway through the round, a chant erupted: ‘Eat that meat!’

At the end of the round, some girls were only able to get through seven wings, but others, like winner Jessica Wolfe from Phi Sigma Sigma, ate 22.

‘I could’ve ate more,’ said Wolfe, a sophomore fashion design major, after her friends helped her clean up with wipes. ‘I wasn’t really tasting them, I was inhaling them.’

The guys were the next to eat. Wolfe stayed, waiting to see if the male sitting in her former spot would ‘uphold the winner chair.’ Instead of the lengthy five-minute round, the guys only had three minutes to scarf down all the wings they could stomach.

Tearing into the meat with sauce splashing across their faces and coating the tips of their fingers, the contestants pressed on.

After three minutes of yelling and cheering, the whistle was blown. Results ranged from 14 wings to the winning 44 wings consumed by Joe Scrofani, a junior sport management major from the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. He cleaned up, removed his iPod ear buds, from which he listened to music during the competition, and said he ‘could eat more.’ Two smaller groups of guys competed, with winning results of 28 and 18 wings, respectively.

The girl and guy contestants who ate the most wings received a $25 gift certificate to local restaurant Wings.

A Facebook group was created for the event, and e-mails and text messages were sent out to student organizations. Theta has fundraised for its philanthropy with numerous other events, including a flag football tournament in the spring, called ‘Theta Bowl,’ and a designer jean sale. Kindinger said the jean sale was replaced with the wing-eating contest because of the small funds the sale brought in.

Kindinger said it is a possibility the event will be done again next year because of the success from this year.

‘The most important thing is everyone has fun,’ she said.

bnfowler@syr.edu

Published on October 24, 2010 at 12:00 pm