Cal Poly float receives Leishman Public Spirit Award at 2025 Rose Parade 

‘Nellie’s Lakeside Laughs,’ recognized for its outstanding floral presentation among this year’s 39 floats

– Cal Poly’s “Nellie’s Lakeside Laughs” float, depicting Scotland’s most camera-averse underwater mystic on its best day, received the Leishman Public Spirit Award at the 136th Rose Parade held New Year’s Day.

“We got the Leishman award for most outstanding floral presentation from a non-commercial entry,” said Collin Marfia, the Cal Poly Rose float president minutes after the awards were announced. “We’re just ecstatic! This is a floral award, and the last time we also won it was in 2016 (for ‘Sweet Shenanigans’).

“I’m just incredibly grateful to have worked with this team this year and so excited to see what they go on to do next year,” the graduate student said of his experience on his fourth Rose Float entry. “I still have another year left. They can’t take me away from this program. I just don’t know in what capacity I’ll be returning next year.”

Cal Poly and California State Polytechnic University in Pomona team up for the Pasadena Classic every year. The entry — the students’ rolling floral bouquet to the world — is among the highest-profile student examples of Cal Poly’s hands-on ethos.

“We take what we learn in our classes and transform it into the best Learn by Doing experience you can find,” the team said in the Rose Parade media guide. “Building a beautiful float every year gives us the opportunity to showcase our career readiness skills that every employer desires by demonstrating that Cal Poly students have the experience, skills, and drive to enter the world as creators, innovators, leaders, and agents of change.”

About 60 students, equally split from each campus, form the leadership teams that work and guide volunteer helpers on the float. Workshops, open to all students, were held throughout the year and between October and December and involved traveling to Pomona to complete the effort, which took until New Year’s Eve.

“Nessie’s Lakeside Laughs” captures the beginnings of a great friendship uniting the once-shy Loch Ness monster with some eager Scottish counterparts. Cal Poly’s 18-by-55-foot entry that rises to 21 feet tall exemplifies the parade’s theme of the “Best Day Ever!” — celebrating “life’s best moments — those unexpected times that bring a smile, warm our hearts and fill us with joy,” said Tournament of Roses President Ed Morales.

“Nessie is very shy, very elusive,” Marfia said. “She doesn’t have very many friends when she’s hiding in the depths of Loch Ness. So when she finally gains the bravery to surface, she ends up making a bunch of new friends. It’s essentially a celebration of love and friendship, and Nessie’s able to finally have her best day ever with her new friends.”

The creature, said to live in the murky, 750-foot-deep freshwater lake in the northern part of Scotland, dominates the float. Nessie looks over a selection of Scotland’s most iconic creatures — with nary a wee midge in sight — and all in various motions:

• An ebony Scottish terrier, tail wagging and mouthing a bone, aboard a wooden rowboat rocking in Nellie’s wake, while a Scottish border collie looks up from the rear of the float trying to get Nellie’s attention.
• A celebrated Norwegian beaver pair, with the population rebounding after beavers were hunted into extinction in the United Kingdom, chew wooden planks into letters spelling “Rose Float.”
• A circus of seven Atlantic puffins, pelagic seabirds reminiscent of penguins (though unrelated, they share similar black-and-white countershading and are also great swimmers), use Nessie’s fins as a Slip’n Slide.
• A gentle highland cow, with long horns and a shaggy coat, rests in an innertube that circles in a pond of colorful iris blooms.

 

The float features over 37,100 flowers as well as a variety of seeds and other organic decorations, “lots of interesting materials this year,” Marfia said.

“We’re using lots of fresh florals again, statice (sea-lavender), irises, carnations, cattails, chrysanthemums, and roses, of course,” he said. “The water tiers near the front of the float are a mix of dry and fresh material, irises, and other florals, blue and purple. There will also be a lot of arrangements of statice and baby’s breath and other things to emulate splashes and water sprays.”

Nessie’s massive body stretching the length of the float is covered in green lentils and split-green peas for a mottled olive look. “She has a (dorsal) fin, and alongside it, we’ve done insets, so there’ll be red carnations, and wild roses along her spine that’ll be bright pink,” he added. “That allows us to give a pop of color and freshness on her main body.”

To achieve the furry animal coats, students used a mix of coconut husk and corn silk. Pinecones provided the ribbing effect on the beaver flat tails. And to create the sleek, wet look of puffin feathers, black moss, and more coconut husks and corn silk were turned into tufts of white.

Spectators at the parade were also able to hear the float’s soundtrack: “New Horizons” by the Gothard Sisters, the American Celtic trio of Greta, Willow, and Solana, from Edmonds, Washington.

Since the late 1940s, Cal Poly universities have produced the only student-built float.

This is their 76th appearance making Cal Poly the fourth oldest participant and the largest of the six self-built entries that include: South Pasadena (130 years); Sierra Madre Rose Float Association (93 years); Burbank (92 years); and Downey (73 years). La Cañada Flintridge (46 years) earned kudos this year by replacing two of its three gasoline-powered V8 engines for hydraulics, animation, and propulsion with six large battery packs weighing over a ton to provide 150 kWh of power. Officials plan to replace the third engine for the 2026 float.

Marfia said this year’s innovations involved refinements to the animation displays.

The teams elected to go all-in on the use of “floating rings” to improve the look of its major animation mechanisms. There is a 6-foot length of them on Nessie’s tail and up to 8 feet on the creature’s neck.

The rings are created using pencil-width steel that is welded into circles, placed around an animation feature and attached through elastic cords and tension. The assembly is covered with neoprene, like an elastic knee brace, to help “give us even more fluid, smooth movements,” he said.

“This is a technique that people usually shy away from or use it in very small applications,” Marfia added. “But we’ve really been pushing and using it on a larger scale these past few years with the snails in 2023’s ‘Road to Reclamation,’ last year’s ‘Shock N’ Roll: Powering the Musical Current,’ and now Nessie.”

The float also includes additional improvements to the animation system that was installed in 2024, which the students say will permit even greater animation options in the future.

Cal Poly enjoys a rich history and tradition at the parade in the Golden State’s City of Roses.

From 1938 to 1965, the campuses operated under a unified administration based in San Luis Obispo. In 1966, the state schools became separate California State University campuses, but students continued the tradition of producing an entry for the Rose Parade that was seen in 2024 in person by over 700,000 parade goers and watched on TV by 28 million on national and international broadcasts.

Cal Poly’s first float was hastily assembled in three months for $258 in the waning days of 1948. Since receiving its first Award of Merit on New Year’s Day 1949, entries have grown in size and sophistication. Along the way, they’ve earned 62 awards, including the 2024 Crown City Innovator for most outstanding use of imagination, innovation, and technology.

A first for the team this year had to do with the love of float building as well as love and commitment. Marfia officiated at the wedding of his sister, Emily, the materials testing lead for the float program who plans to graduate with a master’s degree in Higher Education, Counseling, and Student Affairs in the spring, and partner Aylish Maey.

The young couple was married in front of a crowd of about 100 onlookers that included members of both teams, as well as Cal Poly President Jeffrey D. Armstrong and Cal Poly Pomona President Soraya M. Coley. The ceremony was held on New Year’s Eve in the shadow of the float after its final judging.

“Rose Float people have gotten married before, but never during a Deco(rations) Week and never right after a judging,” he said. “It just felt natural, with all the flowers and all the team around us. It just all came together.”

Just 90 minutes before the parade, Marfia was looking forward to watching Nessie round the corner onto Colorado Boulevard and roll past the team members who invested months of their lives into the ephemeral creation.

“The thing that I’m most excited for is to see my team’s reactions and see their joy and excitement as it passes as a kind of payoff: ‘We did it. We made this.’”