The yearly “Unofficial” celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, a time where hundreds of students gather to drink and party, will be kicking off this weekend.

Students can go between three houses to party and also bar crawl.

Ryan Jenkins, a junior marketing major, is the coordinator and planner of Unofficial this year.

Jenkins had the help of Thomas Blumthal, a junior management major, to help him plan and get ideas for the gathering.

Jenkins estimated that over 500 people would show up to the social gathering.

Blumthal said he thinks more people will be at the second and third houses as opposed to the first house because of how early the gathering is starting, at 10 a.m.

He said his house is the second house in the order of houses for the gathering, and he decided to have an outside party to set his house apart from the other two.

Jenkins and Blumthal said they will be keeping an eye out for high school students trying to sneak in and underage drink at the gathering.

“I’m playing early 2000s hip-hop to keep out the non-‘90s babies,” Blumthal said.

Blumthal said he will be having beer pong in his backyard, but it will be different than normal beer pong with red solo cups.

He said he will be having large trash cans set up in formation for beer pong in his backyard.

“It was sort of a combination of me and my roommates who came up with the idea,” Blumthal said.

Jenkins said the gathering brings out people such as freshmen and sophomores who don’t really do much, and his goal is to bring the entire campus together.

Eastern’s Unofficial has previously been scheduled a week before the University of Illinois’s Unofficial.

“It’s a lack of people because obviously the U of I is bigger, and they also have more money and people,” Jenkins said.

Blumthal said the U of I’s Unofficial has a lot of events going on at once because it is a larger school.

“Last year I think there was just three houses with kegs and jungle juice, whereas this year, I wanted to do the exact same thing with all of the same stuff, but thought about how could I make it better,” Jenkins said.

Blumthal said a lot of alumni and other students who don’t attend EIU come to Unofficial.

Jenkins said he talked to all of the houses to come up with ideas for the event such as volleyball and trash can beer pong to make the gathering more interesting instead of just showing up, drinking and listening to music.

The funds for the event were gathered mainly by selling Unofficial t-shirts, which Jenkins said was put into items such as the kegs, the alcohol, cups, sugar and Kool-Aid.

Jenkins said it took him roughly 3 or 4 weeks to coordinate the event once he got the money from the shirts.

“My main goal is to make sure everything goes smoothly and we don’t have to pay for something to get fixed or for anything to get broken,” Jenkins said.

Liz Stephens can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected].