A midtown Mobile ice cream shop once again stretched the limits of dessert-making over the weekend, building a 60-foot banana split on the campus of the University of South Alabama as part of the fifth annual Funky Monkey 5K and fun run. Cammie’s Old Dutch Ice Cream has made the massive dessert a tradition at the event, adding a few feet to the split’s length nearly every year since the race began. Camilla Petrie-Wayne, who runs the shop, said the team tries to top itself each time.
This year’s creation required roughly 202.5 gallons of vanilla, strawberry and chocolate ice cream, 160 bananas sliced in half, ten bottles of chocolate syrup and six cans of whipped cream. It took a crew of six people to assemble the entire thing on site.
The banana split was the centerpiece of a race that drew close to 400 runners and walkers to the university for the fun run and 5K, an event organized by Thompson Engineering to benefit the Thompson Foundation. Proceeds from registration fees go toward the foundation’s charitable work in the Mobile area.
A Race With a Charitable Engine
As part of the event, teams competed to see who could recruit the most supporters to register and participate. Gulf Coast Dementia Services topped the leaderboard this year, earning a $1,000 check from the Thompson Foundation for having the largest group of backers signed up for the race.
The team-recruitment format turns the race into something more than an individual competition: local nonprofits and service organizations spend weeks mobilizing their supporters, and the group that turns out in the greatest numbers earns a donation directed back into community work. For an organization like Gulf Coast Dementia Services, which supports families across the region navigating dementia care, a $1,000 award and a crowd of new potential supporters are both valuable outcomes of a Saturday morning. The structure also gives every team a stake in the event’s growth — the more people each group recruits, the larger the race and the larger the proceeds the Thompson Foundation has to distribute.
Thompson Engineering, the Mobile-based engineering and design firm that organizes the run, has used the event as one of its signature community engagements. The Thompson Foundation channels proceeds from registration fees into charitable work across the Mobile area, and the race gives the firm’s employees, clients and community partners an annual fixture that mixes fitness, family activities and fundraising in one morning on the USA campus.
The Growth of a Mobile Tradition
The Funky Monkey 5K has grown into one of the more lighthearted fixtures on the Mobile-area spring calendar, blending a competitive run with family-friendly attractions like the banana split build. Runners and spectators alike gather around as the ice cream shop’s crew works to assemble the dessert, often finishing the build not long after the race concludes. Organizers say the event’s combination of fitness and community fundraising has helped it grow steadily since it began five years ago, drawing participants from across the University of South Alabama community as well as area residents who come out each year specifically for the race.
The banana split itself has become the event’s calling card. Each year Cammie’s crew has nudged the length upward, so that returning attendees gauge the event’s scale by how far the dessert now stretches. Building a 60-foot banana split is a genuine logistical exercise: the ice cream has to arrive on site in quantity and hold its shape while six people work down the length of the split, bananas are sliced in halves and laid in rows, syrup and whipped cream are applied in stages, and the finished product needs to look like a single dessert rather than 202.5 gallons of ice cream standing on a table. Midtown’s Cammie’s Old Dutch Ice Cream, a longtime Mobile favorite, has turned that challenge into an annual performance.
Ice Cream and the Gulf Coast Sweet Tooth
Cammie’s holds a particular place in Mobile’s food culture. The Old Dutch name traces to one of the city’s historic ice cream traditions, and the shop’s Midtown location on the Old Shell Road corridor puts it at the heart of one of Mobile’s most active neighborhood commercial districts. Local ice cream shops in Mobile have long doubled as community institutions — cooling off families after youth sports, hosting school celebrations and, in Cammie’s case, supplying the spectacle at charity events across the city.
The logistics of dessert at scale have a Gulf Coast dimension too. Building a 60-foot frozen dessert outdoors in Alabama means working against heat and humidity even in spring, when temperatures can climb into the 80s and the sun on a parking lot can soften a scoop in minutes. Crews plan their assembly around the clock, working quickly and staging ice cream so that the split holds together long enough for hundreds of runners and their families to see it — and, in the spirit of the event, for the dessert to be shared rather than merely photographed.
The USA Campus as a Community Stage
Hosting the event on the University of South Alabama campus gives the race a familiar, centrally located setting for the more than 400 participants and their families. The university’s grounds offer the space a 5K course requires along with room for the dessert build, team staging areas and the family attractions that surround the finish. Community events on campus also serve the university’s own relationship with the city, drawing Mobile-area residents who may have no other reason to visit USA’s grounds that season and giving students volunteer opportunities alongside the engineering firm’s staff.
The university has increasingly opened its campus for events of this kind, from charity runs to festivals, as part of its role as one of Mobile’s largest institutions. For a race like the Funky Monkey 5K, that partnership supplies infrastructure that a downtown course or a neighborhood route could not: parking, restrooms, wide corridors for several hundred walkers and runners of mixed ability, and space for the growing spectacle at the center of the event.
What the Fifth Year Signals
Five years in, the Funky Monkey 5K’s formula — a timed 5K and fun run, a team-recruitment competition benefiting a local nonprofit, and an over-the-top dessert built live on site — has proven durable enough to plan another year of growth. The close-to-400 turnout this year gives organizers a base to build on, and Gulf Coast Dementia Services’ victory in the recruitment competition added a new organization’s supporters to the event’s regular roster.
For the Thompson Foundation, the proceeds continue their quiet work across Mobile-area charities. For Cammie’s and Camilla Petrie-Wayne’s crew of six, the challenge for next year is already implicit in the tradition: the split stood at 60 feet this time, and the team that tries to top itself each year will have to find the gallons, the bananas and the table space to stretch it further. Mobile, which has watched the dessert grow by a few feet nearly every spring since the race began, will check the length first.
Inside the Recruitment Competition
The team-recruitment contest that Gulf Coast Dementia Services won operates on a simple mechanic with outsized effects. Registration for the 5K and fun run is open to anyone, and each registrant can affiliate with a team; the organization whose roster tops the board at race time collects the $1,000 check. That gives nonprofits a concrete, low-cost way to raise both money and visibility: a dementia services provider that turns out 75 supporters has just introduced 75 households to its mission, many of whom may become donors or volunteers long after the race.
The format also builds a habit of participation. Teams that compete one year return the next with bigger rosters, and organizations that lost narrowly tend to recruit harder, which is exactly the growth pattern organizers describe — steady expansion across the event’s five years. The $1,000 prize is modest against the total proceeds the race generates, but its multiplier effect on awareness is what local service organizations value most.
Gulf Coast Dementia Services joins a list of area organizations that have used the Funky Monkey platform this way. Dementia support work in the region — education for family caregivers, respite programs, memory screenings — depends heavily on community fundraising and word-of-mouth referrals, and a spring race that draws families, church groups and workplace teams fits both needs at once. The organization’s supporters, wearing their team colors around the USA campus course, effectively became the event’s largest single bloc this year.
A Morning of Fitness and Family
The race day structure serves the full range of participants, from competitive runners chasing times to families pushing strollers in the fun run. Events of this type have become a staple of the Mobile-area calendar in part because they lower the barrier to participation: no one needs racing experience to join, registration fees are modest, and the post-race attractions — in this case a 60-foot banana split and the spectacle of its construction — give non-runners a reason to come along. Organizers describe the crowd as a genuine mix of university affiliates, Thompson Engineering staff and their families, and residents from across Mobile who return each spring.
The route around the campus also doubles as a showcase of the university’s grounds, and the morning typically runs from early packet pickup through the race, the dessert build and the award presentations, including the handoff of the recruitment prize. By the time the crew of six finishes assembling the split not long after the race concludes, the crowd gathered around it is often the largest the event draws all morning — which is precisely the point of a dessert that now stretches 60 feet down a campus street.