The Jump Around Wisconsin movement started with two friends and neighbors, Greg Thomson and Joe Lahit, were talking about a way to bring some join to their neighborhood, while maintaining recommended social distancing, during the 'Safer at Home' order in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. While having a beer at the end of their own driveways and talking about hearing of the Italian people singing from balconies they decided that tapping into the long standing University of Wisconsin Football tradition was the perfect was to bring their neighborhood together for a few minutes of smiles and laughter. It started wit ha boom box in Greg's driveway blasting the early '90s hit "Jump Around" by House of Pain that is played between the 3rd and 4th quarter at Badger home games. Then it moved to the entire neighborhood turning into a FM transponder that Joe used to broadcast out the song so all the neighbors could listen in at the same tine. After the neighborhood Jump ARound was shared on Social Media it spread like wildfire. Greg and Joe had interview with Wisconsin PBS, WMTV-NBC 15 and WISC-CBS3 with in the week. They started a Facebook group and soon had over 100,000 members in the group from around the world and 104 radio stations across Wisconsin and surrounding states playing "Jump Around" at 3:00 p.m. CT each Saturday. Joe and Greg then decided to help their local community and partnered with Sun Prairie's Razor Sharp printing and Wisconsinred.com to create a t-shirt that would commemorate the event with all proceeds of sales of the shirts going to local charities (United Way of Dane County, Wisconsin Red Cross, Second Harvest Food Bank of S. WI, UW Health COVID-19 fund). The t-shirt was designed by Joe Lahti's 11 year old daughter Fynn Lahti.
You can check out the t-shirts here.
Make sure to crank up 96.3 Star Country tomorrow at 3PM!