The “Hunger Games” has the university’s fraternities and sororities fired up for competition.

Greek Week is April 6 to April 12. The Inter-Greek Council chose the theme “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.”

Emily Lind, a junior from Herrin studying art and the special events coordinator of the Inter-Greek Council, said Greek Week is usually a week of activities when the chapters get together and compete to grow closer.

“We’re changing it up this semester and making it into a semester-long thing, so there’s events once every two weeks or so,” Lind said. “There will be service things like Carbondale Clean Up, going to basketball and baseball games as well as other activities, together.”

Andy Morgan, coordinator of fraternity and sorority life, said the teams have been able to earn points since Inter- Greek Council announced the teams on Jan. 21. He said events where Greeks can earn points change each year.

“The events vary year to year,” Morgan said. “But, typically, you’ll have service related events, educational events, maybe leadership education, risk management, academic and then just some … field day events.”

Bryce Webster, a senior from Woodstock studying psychology and sociology, and president of Inter-Greek council, said Greek Week is something that happens at almost every university with a fraternity and sorority presence.

“It depends on the university on how big of a scale it is,” he said. “The purpose is to build unity so we wanted to announce the teams so they could get to know each other early.”

Webster said picking teams earlier helps build friendships and a stronger bond of the teams. With Greek Week being at the end of the year, it made sense to introduce the teams as soon as possible, he said.

Last year’s theme was Nickelodeon, a theme Webster said was a good idea to draw events from. He said he hopes the same for this year’s subject.

“It was an incredible theme and so we tried to just do something that we could sort of top ourselves last year,” he said. “We want to always be doing better than we have in the past. Hunger Games is really cool right now and there’s a lot you can do with the theme, it provided a really easy framework.”

Webster said there is several ways Inter- Greek Council will use the Catching Fire theme. All the teams will be named after a district from the series, and many of the games and events will be held outside.

Webster said the teams are picked at random by the Inter-Greek Council. “We want to keep the teams equal size,” he said. “The organizations in the Greek community range from two members all the way up to 87 members. We couldn’t just have a chapter of 87 competing against a chapter of two.”

Lind said there are about 125 members on each of the six teams. Of the 33 chapters at the university, 27 are competing.

Webster said in previous years, individual chapters would compete by themselves, and changed to teams three years ago. He said the Greeks compete for bragging rights.

“At that point, they would just assign every organization to a team and then you would end up having teams that have organizations that didn’t want to participate,” he said.

This year, Lind asked the organizations if they would like to participate instead of forcing participation.

Lind said the winning team would be announced at the Greek awards on May 1.

Luke Nozicka can be reached at [email protected], on Twitter at @LukeNozicka or 536-3311 ext. 268.