Sower Sweethearts matches 132 students on Valentine’s Day

2026 Sower Sweethearts contest winners Paige Schuster and Herman Dupre.

By Nora Betts

Managing Editor

This article is featured in the February print edition of the Sower newspaper. 

Sophomore Herman Dupre and freshman Paige Schuster won the Sower Sweethearts Valentine’s Day contest, racing to take a selfie together and secure their prize just three minutes after matchmaking results were released.

Lily Beck and David Claridge.

Sower Sweethearts gathered the interest of 132 students who filled out a 10-question, multiple-choice survey with the promise of being matched with a compatible student of the opposite gender. As an extra challenge, the first match to find each other, take a selfie, and email it to me would win a free dinner date at La Cocina restaurant in Seward and a gift basket, valued at more than $100.

Dupre, a physics major from Pennsylvania, and Schuster, a business and art major from Oregon, wasted no time embracing the challenge, and their quick thinking resulted in their win on Valentine’s Day morning.

Both of them had pre-written emails and waited to copy and paste their match’s name as soon as results came out. Schuster emailed Dupre first, and she was already waiting in J-Top to meet him!

“About 8 o’clock, I hit refresh on my email about once every 15 seconds,” Dupre said. “Paige emailed me first, even though I had an email already written.”

Timothy Baker and Laura VanDerWeide.

Since Dupre lives in Esther Hall, he sprinted over to J-Top, took the selfie with Schuster, and sent it in within three minutes, narrowly beating the next match who sent their selfie at 8:04 a.m.

“I was ready to sprint anywhere on campus, but she did most of the work with having the right idea to be in J-Top,” Dupre said.

After names were released, I received selfies from seven matches, many of them meeting up in J-Top as a casual central location. Matches who competed by sending selfies included Jacob Taylor and Hannah Ethridge, Timothy Baker and Laura VanDerWeide, and David Claridge and Lily Beck.

Dupre wanted to “travel as lightly as possible to be fast” for his run to Janzow, so he went back to his dorm and returned with a gift of chocolates for Schuster, who said they talked in J-Top for about 30 minutes and got to know each other a little bit.

The possibility of free food was the big appeal of the Sower Sweethearts challenge, Schuster said, and she thought that the survey would be fun. Dupre agreed and said he took the survey to try and win the selfie challenge.

The day after Valentine’s Day, the Sower Sweethearts cashed in their La Cocina dinner date. Albeit a little bit awkward, Dupre said the food and the restaurant experience were good, and they both knew what they had signed up for.

“I think we both understood the obligation of, ‘we’re in it now,’” Dupre said.

Hannah Ethridge and Jacob Taylor.

They also received a gift basket of Valentine’s chocolate, microwave popcorn, and an ice cream gift certificate to What’s the Scoop? in downtown Seward.

Dupre said he wished the Sower Sweethearts survey questions were better, more focused on meaningful things like hobbies, or included more open-ended questions instead of multiple-choice. Schuster agreed that the questions felt arbitrary.

“The survey itself, it was interesting,” Schuster said. “It didn’t really ask any personal questions. One of the questions was, like, ‘which type of animal do you think you could take on in a fight?’ so I think it’s kind of hard to pair somebody with that.”

I created and implemented Sower Sweethearts as an ode to a similar matchmaking survey that took place during my freshman year, called CUNE Cupid. That survey in February 2023 was managed by some computer science students and had the same promise of receiving the name of a compatible fellow student on Valentine’s Day.

I filled out the CUNE Cupid survey my freshman year, and it made for a funny and interesting Valentine’s Day with my friends. I like to tell people that my reason for creating Sower Sweethearts this year was to cause either chaos or marriage before I graduate.

A match made by CUNE Cupid in 2023 did lead to marriage, but perhaps unexpectedly. Back when senior Eliya Mars was a freshman named Eliya Moldenhauer, she got matched with her future brother-in-law, but her future husband swooped in to get her first.

Eliya originally did not want to take the CUNE Cupid survey because “my stance had been that I wasn’t going to date freshman year, and I was sticking to that.” An hour before the survey closed, she decided to do it.

Senior Nathan Feusse said he saw CUNE Cupid posters around campus when he was a freshman and decided to take the survey because his friends and older sister told him it would be fun. He got two matches on Valentine’s Day due to a surplus of women filling out the survey, and one of the names was Eliya’s.

“The next day, my friends and I got together at Janz to open our emails and see who we got, and I read Nathan Feusse’s name,” Eliya said. “Emma [Kettelhake], my friend, knew who he was, told me who he was.”

Feusse said he didn’t know Eliya and couldn’t find her on social media, so he gave up trying to meet her.

“I couldn’t find pictures or anything, so that immediately was just, like, ‘eh, I don’t really care enough so I’m not gonna invest too much time in this,’” Feusse said.

But when Feusse’s brother-in-law, Timothy Mars, heard who his match was, he did not want to take any chances.

“Later that day, when I went to choir, I told the person who sat in front of me, Timothy Mars, who I had gotten,” Eliya said. “I asked if he filled it out. He had not. Then right after choir, he asked me for my number.”

“From [Timothy’s] perspective, he said that, as soon as he heard that Nathan Feusse was my match, he knew he had to ask for my number because Nathan was a good guy and he needed to get there first,” said Eliya.

Feusse took this year’s Sower Sweethearts survey “for the fun of it” and because he had friends participating. “I just figured, ‘what the heck, how could it hurt?’”

Eliya and Timothy Mars, both in their final semester, are now married with a daughter. They had no need for Sower Sweethearts.