Her acquaintances refer to her as Courtney. Her close friends call her Court. Her students call her Miss McGovern. Her sorority sisters call her president. And during The College of New Jersey’s Spirit Week, she jokingly went by the nickname of “Homecoming Court.”
Her real name is Courtney McGovern, and as of October 25, 2014, she advanced from being on the Homecoming Court to become TCNJ’s reigning Homecoming Queen, alongside Homecoming King Ryan Boyne.
McGovern, 21, is from Berkeley Heights, New Jersey and originally started her college career at the University of Delaware before transferring to TCNJ the spring semester of her freshman year.
“If you asked me three years ago when I transferred here if I could see myself being Homecoming Queen I would’ve thought you were crazy,” said McGovern. “Never in my life would I picture myself as Homecoming Queen.”
Since arriving at TCNJ, McGovern has definitely found her place and a campus that she can call her home.
“The minute I walked onto campus I felt the sense of community. Everything I do when I get more involved, the more I get invested in it,” said McGovern. “I didn’t even have friends when I came here, I didn’t know what to expect.”
And Courtney has definitely gotten involved since joining the TCNJ community. She is an Ambassador and a sister of Sigma Kappa Sorority. She is also the vice-president of iStem for the Stem Educators Society and the secretary for the National Student Speech Hearing Language Association.
In addition to winning Homecoming Queen, her sorority also won Homecoming Spirit Week for the second year in a row. This year, Sigma Kappa took home the trophy with the brothers of Alpha Epsilon Pi and Sigma Lambda Beta.
Prior to becoming president of Sigma Kappa, McGovern served as Sigma Kappa’s vice president of alumnae relations, which is a position that she feels helped her become Homecoming Queen.
As Homecoming King and Queen, Ryan Boyne and Courtney McGovern will be working with the Department of Alumni Affairs for the next year and help to plan events and serve as liaisons between The College and alumni.
“I couldn’t have asked for a better person to win with because we’re such good friends,” says McGovern of Ryan Boyne. “We played Homecoming King and Queen in our Ambassador skits during Welcome Week last year. People joked that it was going to be foreshadowing and it ended up being true.”
On the day of the Homecoming game, her father, John McGovern, escorted Courtney on the football field at Lion’s Stadium. The Homecoming crown and scepter were passed down to McGovern and Boyne by former king and queen Ryan DeAngelis and Stephanie Rindosh.
“It was a really fun experience getting the crown passed down because we were both good friends with them from Ambassadors. We kept laughing at each other,” said McGovern.
Other than working with the Department of Alumni Affairs at TCNJ, McGovern, an Early Childhood Education and STEM major, hopes to find a job teaching elementary or middle school in any area of math, science or technology upon graduating in May 2015.