Six UMass students broke a world record

With 500 solo cups to spare

This last weekend, six ambitious UMass boys set out to break the world record of world’s largest Solo Cup tower.

In order to break the previous record of 21×21 tower – which totals at 3,311 cups – the boys knew they had to go for a 22×22 base, which is 200 cups more than the past record.

How did they come up with the idea to do this? Sophomore marketing major Ben Wood said he and his friends were sitting around one day talking about how UMass breaks a record every year between sushi rolls and fruit bowls and decided that they should break one of their own.

After much research and dozens of YouTube videos, they settled on the idea of making a pyramid out of cups.

“The big obstacle we quickly became aware of,” said Ben, “was that the record called for around 3,500 solo cups, which would’ve cost around $1500.”

After that calculation, Ben then decided to reach out and send an email to customer service at Solo Cup to see if they would sponsor the challenge. After a small conversation, Solo cup said they could definitely help out and then agreed to send the boys 4,000 Solo cups…for free.

The whole process of receiving the cups in the mail and reserving a room and scheduling a time between the six friends took about three months. Once the day came to actually build the tower, from start to finish with only a couple hiccups, it took about eight hours.

“It was the most defeating feeling when our 14×14 tower collapsed and we had to start all over again,” said Ben. However after that first mess up, it was smooth sailing from there until the final cup was put on top.

“We began by making a pyramid that was 11×11 at the bottom. Then, we extended one side to its full length so there was a structure of 22×11 base. Then we went one row at a time until we had our pyramid of 22x22x22.”

Sophomore Marcus Otis, who also took part in this project, says this is “just the first of many.”

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