How jello shots became an unexpected fan fave at the College World Series
As the end of the college baseball season neared, Kevin Culjat had urgent preparations to make. He built a 16-foot bar top in his Omaha restaurant. He planned to fly in a team of eight from Nashville who would help him install and operate the machinery he'd need.
Countless fans would descend on his Rocco's Pizza and Cantina to cheer on their teams during this month's Men's College World Series. He had to be ready for them every morning with the one thing they'd order: thousands and thousands of jello shots.
This is Culjat's charge as the overseer of what has now been christened Rocco's Jello Shot Challenge: a competition to see which of the eight fanbases supporting their teams at the College World Series can consume the most jello shots during the tournament.
The numbers - driven by passionate fans visiting Omaha, egged on by teams' social media followers - have quickly multiplied.
"What started as people buying two, three, four shots kind of morphed into people buying 50, then 100, then 500, then 1,000," Culjat said. "It kind of exploded."
The viral competition is only four years old but has quickly been embraced by fans. For some, its popularity might even eclipse the baseball games themselves. On Monday, Louisiana State University fans erupted in cheers - an hour before their Tigers took the field - after ordering 21,435 jello shots to break the Rocco's record, previously held by the University of Mississippi.
Culjat is still shocked by how the lighthearted competition turned his bar into a raucous dispenser of gold and purple jello shots. But he's glad it caught on.
"We just kind of got lucky and caught lightning in a bottle," Culjat said. "... Now we're trying to do good things with it."
Running a bar across the street from Charles Schwab Field, the site of the annual postseason tournament to crown the NCAA's baseball champion, is a dream job for Culjat, a college baseball fan since childhood. His competition was inspired four years ago by a rowdy group of fans from the University of Arkansas, Culjat said. While the Razorbacks were in town, the group bought about 800 jello shots from the bar.
Culjat formalized the competition by tracking the shots purchased by the fanbases of each of the eight teams in the tournament on a whiteboard above the bar. Year by year, the numbers climbed. Fans of the University of Mississippi won last year by ordering 18,777 jello shots over the course of the nine-day tournament.
Culjat said he was stunned by the response to the bar's stunt, which was shared widely on social media, drawing die-hards to spend hundreds of dollars in the name of school pride. He donated $52,000 to food banks in Arkansas and Mississippi from the profits. And he thought about how he'd up the ante this year, now that the college sports world was watching.
The first thing he did was find a way to make more jello shots, since demand in previous years blew through his stock and left him scrounging for more, Culjat said. He partnered with a Nashville-based company, Jevo, that flew in special machinery to produce shots fast enough to keep up with demand.
"They've got four machines that will make jello shots every four minutes, all day long," Culjat said. "So far, we haven't run out, and things are going well."
Employees from Jevo even rented a house in Omaha for the week so they can help Culjat man his bar, he said.
It's a good thing Culjat prepared. Fans flocked to the challenge with even more enthusiasm this year. Supporters of underdog Oral Roberts - a private evangelical university in Oklahoma with an enrollment of around 4,000 - ordered over 3,000 jello shots.
But they've all been dwarfed by the contingent of fans supporting LSU, who received some high-profile assistance as they came close to breaking Ole Miss's record on Monday, the fourth day of the tournament. Louisiana native Todd Graves, founder of the fast-food chain Raising Cane's, ordered 6,000 jello shots on Monday afternoon to push Tigers fans over the line.
Rocco's and Graves claimed on social media that his order - which ran up a tab of $30,000 - broke a world record for the largest round of shots purchased by an individual, citing a mark once reportedly held by country singer Merle Haggard but surpassed in other accounts from Europe. Guinness World Records did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Culjat said he and Graves were just glad for the occasion to raise money for charity. This year, Culjat pledged to donate to charities or food banks affiliated with all eight universities or their surrounding towns, as well as one in Omaha. Culjat is still staggered by the numbers fans have been able to accumulate, he added - he's never donated this much money before.
"I kind of hoped that I would write a check this year for $100,000," he said.
He thinks he might get there at this rate, thanks in no small part to the fanatics running up LSU's total. After LSU fans broke the Rocco's record on Monday afternoon, the Tigers lost a close game to Wake Forest but staved off elimination with a win Tuesday evening against Tennessee.
Culjat said he wasn't picking favorites. But it wouldn't hurt if the Tigers kept winning and their fans kept buying.
"If they keep winning, who knows how high that number can go," Culjat laughed.
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