USF students drove to FSU to see snow. And came back with a 250-pound snowball.

When it snowed in North Florida last week, some USF students stayed in bed, scrolling through videos of Florida State University (FSU) students building snowmen and having snowball fights.
But not Rylie Birkey and his friends – they said they wanted to be a part of history.
“We just spontaneously decided in the middle of the night to go up,” Birkey said.
Around 1 a.m. Wednesday, they decided it was going to be a roommate trip – the junior mechanical engineering major and his roommates Daniel Ramos and David Robinson would drive up together.
But then they needed a driver – Birkey wasn’t going to take his manual transmission Mustang four hours north in the icy weather.
So they called one of their friends, Joel Johnson, around lunchtime Wednesday, about three hours before they left.
“[Birkey] was like ‘Joel, whatever you’re doing, clear out the schedule. Reschedule it. We’re going to Tallahassee,’” Johnson, a junior cybersecurity major, recalled.
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They didn’t know yet, but a roughly 250-pound snowball they would later “steal” from FSU would fit in Johnson’s truck bed.
The group knows each other through Chi Alpha, one of USF’s campus ministries. They spend late nights at the Argos Center planning group outings, so deciding on a spontaneous trip in the early hours of the morning wasn’t unusual.
The four friends loaded into Johnson’s truck around 3 p.m. Wednesday to make the trek up to FSU.
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It wasn’t even the group’s first time seeing snow this month. They had been in North Carolina at the beginning of January for a Chi Alpha conference where it had snowed.
But this snow was different. Snow in Florida – that’s “historic snow,” Johnson said.
Winter Storm Enzo dropped around 2-3 inches of snow in Tallahassee and caused FSU to cancel classes for four days. The last time that amount of snow fell in North Florida was 1989.
Ramos agreed but clarified that it wasn’t the fluffy snow they had seen weeks prior. Instead, it was mostly ice.
“The snow up [in Tallahassee] was trash,” the graduate public health major added.
The group of USF students didn’t wait until they got to FSU to play in the snow – they got out at a gas station while Johnson filled up his truck.
They got to the university campus around 7 p.m. They spent hours trying to “penguin slide” down an icy hill. Birkey was the first to try it and hurt his chin, so Johnson tried it right after but hit his shoulder.
“I still remember my shoulder felt it because there was a dent in the snow when I landed,” Johnson said.
Ramos decided to just roll sideways down the hill.
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As they drove around the FSU campus, Johnson had to swerve to avoid a giant snowball, which they estimated weighed 250 pounds.
“My first reaction?” Johnson said. “‘We take this home with us.’”

The rest of the group agreed without hesitation.
“There was kind of no [thought] process,” Ramos added.
As the four of them tried to lift the snowball into the truck, a police officer walked by and gave them advice on how to lift it.
Ramos said the officer might have thought they were helping clear the road and “escorted” them across campus.
Johnson said students were stopping them as they “stole” the snowball to get one last picture with it.
As Johnson was driving, he noticed FSU students pointing at the snowball in his truck. Ramos said the snowball had become “slightly viral” at FSU, since students had collectively packed snow onto it on Landis Green, one of the lawn areas by the dorms.
“In the moment, we were like ‘Yo, we can start this epic FSU-USF rivalry by stealing their snowball,” Ramos said.
“In retrospect, maybe we overestimated how much of a rivalry that would ever actually [cause],” he admitted.

They started the drive back to Tampa a little before midnight, but Johnson had to brave icy hills in the dark. They hadn’t tied the snowball down in the truck bed either, so when Johnson made a quick turn, they felt the snowball slam into the back of the truck.
“There’s that half second of death where I realized, ‘Wait a second, I just pulled a sudden break with a multi-hundred pound iceball we did not tie down,” Johnson said.
Despite feeling a jolt when the iceball slammed into the truck, the group returned to USF unscathed.
Almost a week after they stole it, the grass-and-dirt-covered snowball is melting in Johnson’s truck as Tampa warms up.