BarstoolSHU is Sacred Heart’s student-run, Barstool-affiliated Instagram account that posts student news, campus memes, sports content, and the occasional dorm ranking that starts a minor civil war in the comments. For the past two years, I helped figure out what to say, when to say it, and how to make it entertaining without getting in trouble.
When I first took over the account, I thought it would just be a fun way to post jokes and hype up our sports teams. What I didn’t expect was how much I’d actually learn about Sacred Heart and how much it would make me appreciate it.
I posted win (or loss) memes, made updates when something happened on campus, and every now and then, tried to start a cool event on campus, like the time my friend and I organized a campus-wide snowball fight on the Upper Quad.
Sacred Heart is small enough that everyone’s kind of in on the same inside jokes, but big enough that there’s always something going on. Running the account meant I had to be aware of everything, from what event was coming up, to who won last night’s game, to which dining hall item everyone was weirdly obsessed with that week. I got to see how quickly word travels, how people rally around each other, and how much students genuinely care about what’s happening here.
One of the coolest things I got to do was work with the SHU women’s basketball team when they made the NCAA tournament. Instead of just reposting the score, I teamed up with them to do a “day in the life” series. It gave everyone a look at what they were experiencing and made Sacred Heart’s March Madness run feel even more personal. I learned that the people here love feeling connected, whether it’s through sports, events, or even a meme about not finding parking.
Some of my favorite posts weren’t even the biggest ones. Who else would get genuinely fired up about whether Seton or Roncalli is better than Merton?
There were definitely some challenges along the way. Not everything hit the way I thought it would, but I had to learn when to hold back, when to lean in, and how to handle feedback. Running BarstoolSHU gave me a behind-the-scenes look at Sacred Heart that I don’t think I would’ve gotten otherwise. It showed me how funny people are and how easy it is to bring everyone together with the right post at the right time. Overall, I am so lucky I got the chance to run BarstoolSHU and see firsthand how close Sacred Heart’s community really is.
