Business students will clash with University faculty and staff tomorrow afternoon at the College of Business Administration's first Spring Olympics.

Scheduled to begin at 1 in the Intramural Building, the olympics will feature 17 business organizations and fraternities and one business faculty department, competing in teams of 15-18 people, said Mark Shapiro, chairman of the "olympic committee." Shapiro hopes the olympics will become an annual event, he said.

Eighteen teams will wind their way through battles of volleyball, basketball and relays, Shapiro said, noting that balloon popping, egg tossing and a wheel barrow/chariot race are included as relays.

Teams that lose a race will be eliminated until four teams remain, he said. This "Final Four" will engage in a tug of war to decide which team gets the gold. The top three teams will receive trophies, he said.

"The purpose of the olympics is to bring faculty and students onto the same level -- not as teachers and students, but as peers," said Shapiro, who is also the chairman of the college of Business Administration's Roundtable, a group of business organization presidents.

"I think it would make a professor more approachable outside the classroom," said Jill Havira, director of chapter development for the Penn State Marketing Association, adding that in a one-to-one situation, students would find it easier to talk to a professor who shares common ground outside the classroom.

Shapiro said that Roundtable has made about $1,000 profit which will go towards sponsoring a "Donald Trump-type person" to speak at the campus in the fall. Entrance fee for the event was $30.

"We have an 80 percent response from the business organizations," he said. "To be that successful for the first year, people must seem to think it's worthwhile."

Shapiro said he and his assistant-chairmen, Chris John and Jeff Dryer have been organizing the olympics since January.

"It has been a lot of work," Shapiro said. "You get to work with all kinds of people, and learn to work around problems. The greatest difficulty we had is that there was nothing to go by. It had never been done before."