The inaugural Spirit of Texas music festival is bringing food music and entertainment to the Brazos Valley area.
The music festival will be held this week starting Thursday March 2, and will go until Sunday March 5 at Wolf Pen Creek Park. Run and organized almost completely by Texas A&M students, all four days will be packed with events and there will even be several attempts at breaking world records.
Cynthia Caronna, director of the festival,  said the event aims to benefit the community and carry on through the future.
“We’re trying to build something for College Station and for the Brazos valley,” Caronna said. “Something that will be comparable, in the years to come, to the rodeo in Houston and SXSW in Austin. Something for the Brazos Valley to be proud of. It’s family friendly, done for charities. We’re funding three different charities this year, and we have probably a dozen or more charities represented at the event.”
Caronna said the festival will include a wide range of events in addition to musical talent.
“We have a food truck contest, we have 25 of the top food trucks in the state,” Caronna said. “That’s on Sunday. And we have a craft beer garden, we have music every night … acoustical music in the beer garden and Texas country on the stage. We have a car show that will have over 200 cars in, a bike show with probably a couple of hundred bikes there, and we have a barbecue cook-off that we’re giving $10,000 for. So there’s tons happening, we think we’re going to have around 50,000 people.”
The festival will attempt to break several different world records, according to Caronna.
“We’re going to do three world records … we have Guinness Book of World Records coming in,” Caronna said. “World’s largest chili, world’s largest Frito-pie, and world’s largest two-step. We’re going to make 5,000 pounds of chili. We’re going to work with the Little Wranglers and some of the Aggie Wranglers, and we’re going to do the world’s largest two step. We hope to have about a thousand people out there.”
Sterling Woerner, assistant director and senior marketing major, described the extent of the student involvement in organizing and planning the event.
“The meat science people and the nutrition people have created the recipe for the chili,” Woerner said. “We have the marketing team working on the entire campaign from social media to promotions to ads … to the website. We have our Corps and our engineers working on the logistics and operations. We have an executive director, and the rest is student run.”
Daniel Kim, student volunteer and marketing senior, said the festival will provide an opportunity for the community to come together for a good time.
“I’m excited to see the community engage in this amazing festival,” Kim said. “I believe this will be an excellent opportunity for students to hang out and take a break from school to enjoy food, dancing, games. We have local businesses partnering with us to make the festival a success, so come out with your friends. We’ll have a lot of chili, so come hungry.”