American idols Kelly Clarkson and Ruben Studdard may be facing a bit of competition in the future.

Last Friday night, Oct. 3, at the Bronc Buffet’s Rider Idol competition, senior Jamaal Harris wowed judges with his talent and walked away a winner.

For Harris’ first-place performance he sang an original song called “What’s My Name?” which featured second-place winner junior Andre Middleton, also known as Epiphany Blue, singing the chorus. Third place went to freshman Mona Kanwar.

“You’ve just got to go out and try your best,” said Harris. “I was happy that everyone took to my music as well as they did and that the judges thought what they did of it. I was just grateful.”

Harris said that the competition from his fellow contestants was strong.

“I thought all of the performances were outstanding,” said Harris. “I was surprised that I won.”

Student Government Association (SGA) President Ryan Kimble was one of the students who worked on creating the event, which was already being planned towards the end of the summer.

“Over the summer we wanted to make Bronctoberfest fun and we wanted to start a new tradition. We wanted to come up with our own theme for the SGA Bronc Buffet,” said Kimble, “So we decided to do Rider Idol. From there it probably took about a month and a half to plan the whole thing.”

The try-outs began on Sept. 25 and lasted two days. Kimble said that of the 24 students that auditioned 12 moved forward to the final competition.

“It was a closed try-out because we didn’t want people to feel nervous,” he said. “Only 10 people showed up for the final. There was a lot of advertisement but I think we could have gotten a lot more people to tryout.”

About 600 people attended the buffet and, according to Kimble, there was a constant crowd of about 150 students that actually stayed to watch the competition. As far as next year goes, he said that he hopes that Rider Idol will become an annual event.

“I think the students enjoyed it. It’s something very hard for people to do and I just wish there had been more people there to watch it. But this is the first time it’s ever been done so hopefully in the future it will become a bigger tradition,” he said. “It was good overall for just giving students a choice of a couple things to go to that night.”

Freshman Tiffany Vaughn went with some of her friends to the buffet and watched some of the competition.

“Everyone from what I heard was really good, but I don’t know who won. I only heard about three people sing,” she said.

Although Vaughn did not stay long, she said that she did enjoy the event, but does not think that it should take place annually.

“The whole American Idol thing is kind of played out so doing the Rider Idol thing every year would be kind of repetitive and stupid,” she said.

After helping to organize the event, senior Shawn Hammer said that he went to watch and show his support.

“I think it went really well. I went with my girlfriend and we had a great time listening to all the contestants,” said Hammer. “It was better than I had expected. I knew that we had a lot of talented people singing but I was kind of blown away by it.”

From what he saw, Hammer said that those students who did attend seemed to really enjoy the event.

“Everyone was really interested in it. There was a lot of applause for all of the contestants and I think they influenced the judges decision a bit,” said Hammer.

Some of the judges included Kimble, Professor of English Harry Naar and Area Director Dennis Reno. Hosting the show was senior Nigel Francis, who said that he enjoyed watching everyone compete.

“I just found it surprising how the people who did their original pieces came in the top two and kind of steered away from the cliché ballads that everybody usually sings,” said Francis. “The winner was a rapper and the guy who came in second was a poet. So that was kind of cool. I think the judges did a good job.”

Depending on how far his music career takes him, Harris said that he will likely participate in future on-campus talent events, perhaps not for the sake of competing, but just to let students hear what he is working on at that time.

“Myself and Andre are both working on albums and they should both be coming out in 2004,” said Harris. “The title of my album so far is The Jersey Devil. Both of them will be available around campus so look out for them.”