Meet the Momagers—and Coaches—Who Really Run Sorority Rush

In 2021, TikTok’s algorithm blanketed feeds across the world with videos from sorority rush at the University of Alabama, and nearly overnight, a group of teenage girls in Tuscaloosa gave users a front row seat to sorority pledging in the American South. In 2023, Bama Rush, a documentary from Vice Studios that followed four women through rush, tried to make something more solid out of the Outfit of the Day videos. The initial attraction of #BamaRush has faded from its saturation point, but an online fascination with Southern sorority life has lingered.

Vice Studios decided to return to rush in 2024 with a new perspective. In A Sorority Mom’s Guide to Rush, which began a 10-episode season on Lifetime last month, filmmakers follow 20 mother-daughter pairs at different Southern universities as they get ready for the grueling rush season. The cameras are rolling when Bid Day at the University of Mississippi turns the streets of Oxford into a Lululemon Pamplona, but most of the footage comes from earlier sessions with rush coaches Bill Alverson and Brandis Bradley. With the assistance of their mothers, the coaches help each potential new member as they workshop rush week outfits, film an audition tape, and master the etiquette. Behind all the rigmarole, each coach is really helping the pairs deal with their separation anxiety as the daughters embark on their adult lives.

For Lauren Terp, one of the show’s executive producers, tracking last year’s PNMs—that’s potential new members—led to deeper meditations on the nature of adulthood. “Sometimes we think that it’s isolated to when you’re in your early 20s and you’re venturing out into the world for the first time,” she says. “But I think it’s such a human thing to figure out: How do I represent myself in the world? How do I do that in a way that’s authentically me and what’s the reaction going to be when I put that out there?”

Vanity Fair spoke to Terp, cohead of unscripted at Vice Studios, about casting mother-daughter pairs who were willing to let it all hang out, and why outsiders find the sorority ritual so fascinating.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Vanity Fair: How did the show grow out of Bama Rush? The addition of the mothers really provides a whole new perspective about why sororities have become so important to the culture at Southern schools.

Lauren Terp: After Bama Rush, we really wanted to continue the cultural conversation with a much more intimate look at rush from an on-the-ground perspective. We really wanted to be able to get in there with the young women and kind of follow them through that experience, but also have a broader range of experiences and perspectives. We were trying to understand where these young women were coming from. Is this young person coming from a family that has a history of legacy membership where this is an expectation? With that can come certain pressures, and it gives us insight into whatever they may be facing. They also might be coming from a background where nobody in their family even went to college—that’s a whole other layer that we get to dive into because we get so many different perspectives. Then we added the coaches, which have increasingly become their own cultural phenomena—how do we use resources like coaches in any aspect of our life to help us prepare?

When you were casting the mother-daughter pairs, what qualities attracted you?

It’s so funny because there are certain formulas that people might have, and I don’t know that we necessarily had a formula. We were very familiar with this world, especially the online world, and I was always curious to know more about the girls who gave us their OOTDs [Outfit of the Day]. We thought about how they might present on TikTok, how in-depth we felt we could go with their stories, and we weighed how comfortable they were with sharing.

One of the first casting tapes to come through would be our first episode. It was Carol Anne [an Auburn alum who loved her sorority] and Emily [Carol Anne’s daughter and a rising Auburn freshman who was feeling nervous about rushing]. The pure excitement, the stakes, and a little bit of fear—all of that just came through so loud and clear. The dynamic between Emily and her mom, it was really compelling in a way that extended well beyond sorority rush.

Authenticity was a huge thing for us. I think we all look for authenticity when we’re watching creators online, but for us, we wanted to make sure that we were filming with people who were very comfortable being open and sharing their experience with us and sharing the struggles.

The show focuses on the way that rush is a rite of passage, a ritualized series of steps to move from childhood to adulthood. But Alverson and Bradley are so helpful in explaining how sorority culture and aesthetics are attainable with some money and the right approach. The real challenge of rush is figuring out if you actually want to be a part of it. In a certain way, the particularities of each sorority are far in the background of the show. Was that intentional?

The sororities are really in the background. They weren’t our priority, and they only came up to the extent with Carol Anne and Emily because there was a personal connection to them, so that was important for them. For us, it’s not really about the sororities at all. It’s about the young women and the rite of passage that they’re going through. The sororities are obviously part of it, but the sororities really are in the background. It’s not about them. There can be secrecy around Greek life, but that’s not what we were interested in investigating.

I don’t know how the sororities themselves feel about the show, but I think we’re really good at knowing where that line is and walking right up to it. There’s a little bit of mischief in this show too—whether it’s through Bill or whether it’s these girls telling their own stories and putting their stories out there into the world. And I think that the young women that we follow have so much agency.

Did you guys have conversations about what would happen if a given girl didn’t get a bid? Were you worried it might be narratively unsatisfying?

The truth is, throughout the process, you really don’t know what is going to happen for any given person going through rush. We knew it was so competitive and that young women might have their hearts set on one sorority and not get that one. There’s so many things that you go through during recruitment week, along with the rejection, and you just never know how someone’s going to handle it. If they didn’t get a bid or if they decided to drop out, that’s the story that we were there for. I think it was on us to just make sure that whatever happened, we were ready.

I wasn’t totally expecting it to raise those big, emotional questions—the meaning of parenting in the modern era, the breakdown of community in the age of social media, class ascendance and the American dream—but it’s all there. Why is sorority rush such a good vehicle for those ideas?

It’s a huge moment of transition for young women. The closets are fun, and the OOTDs are great—and the price tags! But underneath all of it is something really compelling. We look at it on TikTok, and we see all this stuff that might feel performative from the outside—or study even further and call it a spectacle. But at the end of the day, there’s real meaning there.

I love that our young women all have really diverse outcomes. Some of them chose to drop out themselves because they realized it wasn’t for them. And for the people who do go through and do find their home, it adds a ton of value to their life, and I hope that everybody has that. I hope that everybody can find where they feel like they belong, and if they don’t feel like they belong [in a sorority], then they don’t have to be there. They can find it somewhere else.