You can tell a lot about a girl by the shoes she’s wearing.  The same principle applies at Wake Forest where girls flaunt their sorority pride by wearing Converse sneakers, or “Chucks”, in their house’s colors.  Typically, in addition to having your Chucks’s color represent your sorority, girls will decorate the white rubber on the end of their shoes with fun designs.  Chucks also are useful because they prevent the loss of other pairs of shoes due to the hazardous layer of sludge that coats the basements’ of fraternity houses.  Too many soles have been lost to this tragic epidemic.

For those who don’t know the Chuck code, let me explain it to you.  All the different sororities have different colors of Chucks associated with them.

·      Alpha Delta Pi: Light Blue 

 ·     Kappa “Beta” Gamma: Navy 

 ·     Chi Omega: Red 

·      Delta Delta Delta: Royal Blue with yellow laces 

 ·     Delta Zeta: Pink or Green 

·      Kappa Alpha Theta: Black 

·      Kappa Delta: Green 

 ·     Kappa Kappa Gamma: Navy

After receiving a bid in January, girls and their Bigs swarm Hanes Mall to purchase their Chucks.  There’s an intangible excitement in the air as you run in and out of the various shoe stores, searching for the perfect fit.  Since some sororities have the same general colors, it becomes harder and harder to find a pair of Chucks in your size.  Then panic sets in. And you’ve never seen anything scarier than a pack of girls desperately running around a mall in the search for shoes.  But that’s all part of the fun!  Once you buy your Chucks, it is a physical reminder that you’ve joined an amazing sorority and begun a new chapter in your life.

I remember buying my Chucks earlier this year.  I went with a few older girls and a girl from my pledge class who I did not know very well.  The mania and silliness of running around the mall looking for the perfect green shoelaces bonded us together; now, she is one of my best friends in my sorority.  I got lucky and found a cute pair of light pink Chucks in the first store we went to.  I paired them with light neon green shoelaces to showcase my DZ pride.  Later in the semester, I had a girl on my hall decorate the toes of my shoes with my letters and a Lilly Pulitzer print. (I was too scared to decorate them myself because of my sub-par crafting skills.)

Many claim that by being involved in the Greek system, one loses their individuality.  I completely disagree with this claim and Chucks are my proof.  A girl’s chucks highlight their creativity while tying her to a larger community.  There are no identical pairs of Chucks, just like there are no identical girls in a sorority.  Wearing Chucks is a celebration of a sorority girl’s uniqueness and devotion to her sorority, as well as, an exclusive tradition of the Wake Forest Greek system.