Notre Dame Magazine invites personal essays of no more than 250 words on subjects of nostalgic interest to alumni of all ages. Selected submissions will be published in a future print edition or online at magazine.nd.edu. Please send fun, meaningful or evocative stories from your student days on the topics listed below to associate editor Michelle Cuneo at mmcdani2@nd.edu. New topics to come each issue.
FISHER REGATTA: Deadline Feb. 2, 2026
COLLEGE ROAD TRIPS: Deadline May 4, 2026
Promises to keep
To start a snowball fight, one young man among a group of young men who were leaving a dining hall might pick up a handful of snow, pack it into a ball and throw it at another group of young men who were heading in for a meal. This is not to suggest that women do not participate in snowball fights. To the contrary, I once saw a black-and-white photograph of a huge snowball fight that occurred at Bryn Mawr College, a women’s college in Pennsylvania. The combatants, all women, wore wool sweaters and pleated skirts. The photograph appeared to have been taken in the early or mid-20th century.
The student body at Notre Dame during my years on campus was coed. Nevertheless, I recall my snowball fights at Notre Dame as being like the one at Bryn Mawr in one respect: They were single-sex affairs. I don’t recall throwing a snowball at a female student.
As for those of us in the fights, we pelted each other with unbridled aggression. We were bending, packing, ducking, bobbing, dodging, weaving and hurling snow. Nevertheless, with bodies that had aged a mere 17 to 22 years, none of us grew tired. Rather, the fight ended when, like Robert Frost’s carriage driver stopping by woods on a snowy evening, we remembered we had promises to keep.
— John Huebl ’86