Sunday’s Quad Day showcased the variety of clubs, groups and teams Illinois students have created for themselves.

From well-established groups to first-year newcomers, more than 800 Registered Student Organizations, or RSOs, lined the Quad at the 37th annual event.

Quad Day traditionally brings a large number of people to the heart of campus. An estimate of 10,000 students attended Quad Day 2007.

This year’s Quad Day also drew large crowds on the warm and sunny afternoon. Traffic on the paths crawled past tables offering Frisbees, cups, pencils and flyers.

“It was really cool because there were a lot of clubs I didn’t know about,” said Amanda Chang, freshman in LAS.

Pirates of Chambana was one new group that set up a table on the Quad to recruit new members.

James Finkle, junior in Engineering, and Arthur Rudolph, junior in LAS, the group’s founders, dressed as pirates for the day to promote their first event: a pirate costume shopping trip followed by bowling.

“We’ll go to gift shops and look for pirate costumes and then go pirate bowling,” Finkle said. “We’ll be dressed up and talking about cannons and saying ‘Arrr.’ It will be bowling, only fun.”

Finkle said the group filled five sign-up sheets between the beginning of Quad Day at noon and 1:30 p.m.

Fusion, a business student group, also hoped to add to its membership list. The group is in its third year on campus and currently has about 25 members, said Mallory Sester, senior in Business.

“It’s a good way to set yourself apart,” Sester said. “It’s a good way to get involved in something other than a business frat.”

Larger organizations such as Illini Pride also joined in the day’s festivities, which included performances by dance groups and the Marching Illini.

Members of the men’s basketball team handed out flyers and orange and blue beaded necklaces for Illini Pride to help support the group that supports them, said senior guard Trent Meacham.

Some students were impressed by the variety of activities spread out before them on the grassy plain of the Quad.

Others, like Johnna Thompson, sophomore in ACES, took advantage of sign-up sheets to connect to groups that interested them. Thompson said she gave her name and e-mail address to between five and eight groups at the event.

Ahmed Maki, freshman in LAS, said he thought the crowds at Quad Day could have been better organized with more signs marking the types of groups located in each area. He still found groups relating to his hobby of sailing and his career interest in medicine.

As students made their way past the booths, they found many offering brochures and stickers, and some offering more unique advertisements.

The Horticulture Club doled out plants in small containers of dirt, while the Physics Society handed out what they called “the coolest flyers on campus”: white sheets of paper fresh from a bucket of liquid nitrogen.

The club makes ice cream using liquid nitrogen and runs a physics van that brings physics demonstrations to elementary school students.

“It gives us a break to enjoy physics and talk about it and have fun,” said the group’s president, Ian Wisher, junior in LAS.