A highly secretive BTS operation happening in backrooms and basements of sorority houses.

Two Ts In A Pod with Teddi Mellencamp and Tamra Judge

In this episode of Dirty Rush, hosts Gia Giudice and Daisy Kent interview Avery and Bella regarding their roles in the 'logistics' or 'backr

Key takeaways

• The logistics team conducts extensive background research on PNMs during the summer months.
• At TCU, the recruitment pool can include as many as 1,300 registered girls for a single chapter.

Main topics

• Sorority recruitment logistics
• PNM vetting processes

Notable quotes

They called us logistics, but the words are like all interchangeable.

Conclusion

The episode provides a fascinating, behind-the-scenes look at the rigo

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:00) This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Lisa, tell them about our new show. We have a new podcast. It's called Don't Lie to Me. I'm Lexi Iwano. We're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa DiGiulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions. And at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all. Now in my 30s, being the founder of New Shoes, good taste is my business. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 4 (0:35) I'm Lacey Mosley, author, actor, stand-up comedian, creator, and host of Scam Goddess Podcast. The true crime comedy podcast all about robbery, fraud, and those who practice it. Each week I bring on an amazing guest. Speaker 1 (0:47) Ooh, I scammed him. What? I could talk to you for an hour. Speaker 4 (0:50) You're a generational yapper, like me. That's why I had to make yapping a job. And now you can catch full episodes of my show on YouTube. Start listening to Scam Goddess on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 5 (1:05) Hi, this is Kylie Brakeman, Angela Speaker 4 (1:07) Geratana, Jeremy Colhane, Patrick McDonald, and Speaker 5 (1:10) we're the hosts of the Artists on Artists on Artists on Artists podcast, the Speaker 4 (1:14) improvised character comedy podcast, where each week a new panel of artists discuss their craft. Join us for a panel of Eurovision participants. And Speaker 5 (1:23) we do a little Halloween sometimes. Does the Pope dress up? He winks on Halloween. Speaker 1 (1:28) He gets right up next to the microphone. Speaker 5 (1:30) I hear you can almost hear the eyelashes hit each other. Speaker 1 (1:33) You've never seen Italy so quiet as when the Pope gets up to wink on Halloween. Speaker 5 (1:38) Listen to Artists on Artists on Artists on Artists every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 1 (1:46) What up? This is Jay Valentine, co-host of the R &B Money Podcast alongside my brother, R &B legend Tank. Together, we've built a space for artists, executives, and fans of R &B music to reminisce and tell the real stories behind the music. I Speaker 4 (1:59) have no money. I was hood famous. Speaker 1 (2:00) They think you're going to get everybody out. We Speaker 4 (2:01) lived in a project. Real love came out. They're hearing the music and we had nothing. From Speaker 1 (2:06) Smokey Robinson to Mary J. Blige, B2K to Jill Scott. If you're a super dedicated R &B fan, this is where you belong. Listen to R &B Money from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 7 (2:20) Hey, it's Alec Baldwin. This season on my podcast, Here's the Thing, I talk to actor Stephen Root. Speaker 1 (2:26) I'm a people watcher. You see that guy going down the screen and go... Yeah, I can use that. Speaker 7 (2:31) And Open Igloo co-founder Alia Mohamed. Speaker 4 (2:33) I love staying on top of what is going on in our city, what is on renters' minds, and taking all of that knowledge to build a platform that hopefully is going to make New York City better in the long run. Speaker 7 (2:45) Listen to Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 1 (2:52) On recent episodes of The Questlove Show, I chatted with JoJo about her music and Wallo267 about his story and everything in between. Speaker 3 (3:00) Don't invite me to karaoke. I'm going to make it weird. Someone's going to try to sing Leave Get Out or Too Little Too Late or Baby It's You. Oh no. And I'm going to be like, Speaker 1 (3:08) okay, cool. Check out my conversation with JoJo, Wallo267, and more on The Questlove Show. Listen to The Questlove Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Peace. Speaker 4 (3:22) Did you think you were the only one? Like no matter what you did, it was never good enough for your mother. I'm Jennifer Arnese, and this is the Black Mother Wound Podcast, where we unpack and heal from the very first relationship that shaped us. We rush to accommodate other people when we have been hurt and our hurt has not been healed. Listen to the Black Mother Wound podcast from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 8 (3:53) Welcome to Dirty Rush, the truth about sorority life, with your hosts, Speaker 3 (3:57) me, Gia Giudice, Daisy Kent, Speaker 5 (4:00) and Jennifer Fessler. Speaker 3 (4:04) Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of Dirty Rush. It's Daisy and Joan here again, and we're going to dive more into Basement Girls today. All right, welcome in our next guest. Hey. Hi. Thank you guys for coming on. Of course. I'm so excited. I'm Joan, by the way. Yeah, and I'm Daisy. Speaker 2 (4:22) Hi, I'm Avery. And Speaker 3 (4:24) I'm Bella. Nice to meet you, Avery and Bella. We're so excited to have you Speaker 6 (4:29) guys on. I'm very intrigued by this whole basement girl. And first of all, is that what they call you guys at your sorority? Are you back room or basement? Speaker 2 (4:41) They called us logistics, but the words are like all interchangeable. Yeah. Like upstairs Speaker 6 (4:46) girls. Yeah. Speaker 2 (4:48) Yeah. Speaker 6 (4:48) Got it. The concept Speaker 3 (4:49) is the same. Yeah. Okay. And did you guys both do it? Yeah. It was fun. Yeah. What year are you guys right now? I'm a junior. Speaker 8 (4:59) And I'm a senior. Yeah. Speaker 3 (5:00) Oh, so fun. Yeah. So what did it like all entail you guys being back there? Well, Speaker 8 (5:08) everyone kind of has like different roles, but for the most part, it's like we kind of do more. like behind the scenes work rather than just like talking to girls that are coming in? So Speaker 2 (5:19) like basically what we do is every girl, when they apply to recruitment, they submit like resumes and all their social medias and stuff. So that's really like what we're looking at. Like we spend our entire summer researching basically everything about these girls. Like we text people who know them. We really try to just like understand the full picture of them because it's really hard to obviously see exactly. They are on paper. So anything we can do to get to know them is like really helpful for us. And so we did that over the summer. And then really just everything behind the scenes recruitment wise falls on to like us back upstairs team logistics. How Speaker 6 (5:57) many are there of you like that is doing all? I mean, how many girls are there that you're going to be investigating that you're looking into? Do you have a big team that does that over the summer? Or is it just the backroom logistic team? Speaker 8 (6:10) There this year, they were like our school. There were 1300 girls who registered for recruitment. And we literally look through every single one of them, obviously, just like like for numbers reasons. Not everyone comes into our house and everyone's house. But we look through every girl and there were like, what, Speaker 2 (6:32) eight of us on. Yeah, I think it was like eight. to 10, I want to say. It's usually a pretty big number. And I think actually with the numbers growing each year in terms of PNMs, we're looking at growing the team. And even, I think we have talked about starting like a bigger team over the summer and then Speaker 3 (6:51) narrowing Speaker 2 (6:52) it down once we actually get to recruitment. I Speaker 3 (6:54) feel like that would be fun, like looking everyone up and trying to Speaker 8 (6:57) find everybody. It's actually so fun, but it's funny because not everyone like knows it's like every time I'm like, oh, it's so much work. They're like, Okay, you're literally stalking people, but it is a lot of work because you want to make sure that you're like, a girl could look picture perfect and have all these things on her resume or whatever, and then you were told that they're not nice at all. And obviously, you're not doing that through social media and stuff. Yeah, she's not Speaker 6 (7:22) going to admit to being a bully or whatever. Speaker 2 (7:24) It's crazy some of the things people send in to you just to let you know that this is not really what. the girl seems to be so that's one thing having to deal with confidentiality like this summer yeah Speaker 3 (7:36) so when that happens though if like a girl that's already in your sorority like reaches out and like says something about a girl that might be coming to school there are you automatically like no like she can't be in her sorority or do you still like vibe her out a little bit we Speaker 8 (7:51) like obviously we don't know how it works in like other houses but yeah we really don't like the term like blacklisting like we don't yeah we don't do that because like we also like to give people the benefit of the doubt like some people unfortunately like they might not have have had a great high school experience and then like they turn out to be great in college and like we don't want to like put off their chances yeah so i mean i'm biased but i think that we do a really good job of like making sure that like everyone gets like a chance and if they like have great conversations and like I don't want to say prove themselves because they're not, they're not proving themselves, but like, we just, we just want to give people like a chance. Would you? Yeah. Speaker 2 (8:31) Yeah. No, I totally agree with that. I feel like we also always like think about like, where is it coming from? Is this just someone, you know, from their high school that there's talking about, or is it something like actual evidence? Because it's, it's, it's already is such a big part of people's college experience. And so one thing that they didn't in high school, like it's unfortunate sometimes if it, affects their college experience. So we really try to like take it super seriously. And Speaker 8 (8:56) since there's like only like relatively like a small group of like the basement girls or whatever, like everyone has an, like a different position that kind of focuses on like other things. So Avery was like our head this year. And so she kind of like looked over everything that was going on and, and not necessarily had like the final say, but kind of, if she, if she saw like she was just kind of like the leader. She was guiding everyone through it, making, and she'd also done it the year before. So she had like a little bit more of experience. So it helps like everyone's other, like everyone's kind of designated to certain things. Yeah. So are Speaker 3 (9:34) you guys like the final say if someone gets into the sorority or not, or is it like the recruitment chair or the president? How does that work? Speaker 2 (9:43) So my position, which I was head of logistics this past recruitment, me and the VP of recruitment worked hand in hand. And so once everyone left after the long, long hours of work week and recruitment, we would stay and just reevaluate everything that we had looked through in the summer. We were, you know, calling people really just trying to get like every single thing that we could know about these girls. These numbers are so big. So every information that you can get really helps you actually narrow it down to that class that you need. Because I think almost every round we were doing half of the people cut. Oh, huge cuts. Huge cuts. How many girls do you take? This year we took 96. And so, gosh, I mean, yeah, there was 1,300 girls coming through. So pretty much only. Yeah, it was a lot. It was a hard, hard recruitment process this year. Speaker 8 (10:40) Yeah, it's like the longest, most like, I mean, it's so emotional for obviously the person going through it, but then also us too, because it's like no one likes making those like hard decisions. Oh no, it's so hard. I remember Speaker 3 (10:52) doing it and it's like, you're so excited and it's so fun, but it's also just like overwhelming and tiring and like very dramatic. Yeah. Yeah. Daisy, where did you go to school? I went to San Diego State. Speaker 2 (11:04) Okay. Okay. That's cool. Speaker 3 (11:07) The Speaker 2 (11:07) Abercrombie process is even, I feel like it's even harder than ours. When I talked to my friends, I went through it. Speaker 3 (11:13) I don't even like, I don't remember how many girls like we took every year. I feel like it was around like 75, but I feel like CSU is like such a big school. And I know it's probably only grown since I was there, but I had no idea about like a sorority or what it was before I went. And then my roommate. who I like my own Facebook, she was like, will you please just do recruitment with me? And my last name is Kent and hers was Keller. So like out of all the girls, we were in the same like 15 person, like, Oh, you're over whatever that like, and so it was like, so funny, but it was, I don't know. It was like fun. How do you guys go Speaker 6 (11:52) about. like not having your own biases. Like, so I'm thinking that, of course, you're going to know some of these girls coming through and like not putting yours to the top because you know them and you really