Competitors at Cal State Long Beach’s Outdoor Adventure Club took selfies on the sand for points on Saturday as part of a national Outdoor Nation Campus Challenge that will last eight weeks.
Points are tallied individually by the amount of selfies each participant takes of himself or herself doing an outdoor activity, according to Outdoor Nation Campus Challenge website terms and conditions. The participants would then upload the selfies to his or her profile on Outdoor Nation, according to the terms and conditions.
Each selfie is worth 10 points and, after they are posted, the points are automatically tallied for that college, as mentioned in the terms and conditions. Scores, rankings and points are viewable by the public online so they can view their ranks and see where they’re placed nationwide, according to the online leaderboards’ posts on Outdoor Nation’s Campus Challenge’s website.
Since Saturday, CSULB held their rank against larger schools in the east, such as University of Central Florida, according to the online leaderboards’ posts.
“It is our first year, and we think of it as sort of a pilot, we like to think of it like March madness meets Mother Nature,” said Chris Fanning, the executive director of the Outdoor Foundation. “…there has been an incredible decline in outdoor participation among the younger generation, and I think it’s resulting in part to child obesity and child inactivity crisis,” she said.
This competition pits 10 selected schools nationwide in a battle royal to see who can be the National Outdoor Champion; all 10 qualified schools are listed online at oncampuschallenge.org.
“We started about four or five years ago this thing called Outdoor Nation, which is all about inspiring and empowering young people, particularly college students, to activate their generation to get outdoors,” Fanning said.
Currently, CSULB has the second lowest numbers of competitors – 120 – compared to other schools like Spelman College, which has 55 participants, according to the online leaderboards’ posts.
CSULB advanced their ranking from No. 7 at the end of Saturday night to No. 6 Sunday night, according to the posts. Monday morning, CSULB made it to No. 5, but dropped back to No. 6 Monday afternoon.
“We can compete — I think we have a good shot at winning it,” said Michael Colavita, the founder and current president of the Outdoor Adventure Club. “Students are hungry for this stuff, they are craving it, getting into the wild.”
According to the current leaderboards’ posts, Long Beach faces east coast schools like College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University with 1,360 participants and schools like Michigan Technological University with over 648 participants these numbers have increased rapidly as the days past according to number’s on the Outdoor Nation’s Campus Challenge’s website.
“Every time someone goes outdoors from Cal State Long Beach or in the name of Cal State Long Beach, we get points,” Colavita said. “It can be any outdoor activity, gardening counts as one, resting outdoors, anything outdoors that’s not a traditional sport, so baseball and soccer would not count.”
While anyone can compete and earn points for Cal State Long Beach by simply creating an account on the Outdoor Nation Campus Challenge webpage, the Outdoor Adventure Club is the organization that originally applied to the contest, Michael Colavita said.
“I think that demonstrates the interest and excitement that young people have to support the outdoors,” Fanning said. “And to engage their community and their campus in a competitive challenge and see who can be National Outdoor Champion.”