After last year's football victory against Baylor, riots ignited the streets of Morgantown. Less than a day later #RespectfulMountaineer, a student run initiative, was born. Junior business students and Honors College scholars, Chris Hickey and Deonna Gandy, founded the student-run initiative with a mission of promoting a spirit of respect among students, alumni, residents of surrounding communities, and the state.
Hickey was the first person to use the hashtag on Twitter. At 4:23 p.m. on Sunday (Oct. 19) he tweeted, “My name is Chris Hickey and I’m a #RespectfulMountaineer. I love and respect this University and the town in which it resides.”
Within two days, the #RespectfulMountaineer hashtag reached more than 500,000 people and 1.4 million timelines on Twitter. Two weeks following the hashtag's release, ESPN's College Game Day and Snapchat came to Morgantown to watch WVU take on the Texas Christian University Horned Frogs.
The nation was watching, and #RespectfulMountaineer leveraged its platform to reach a national audience. With College Game Day and Snapchat present, 13,000 #RespectfulMountaineer t-shirts were distributed by students for students as a way to show the nation who Mountaineers really are.
The rest is history waiting to be written. What's your story?