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PROJECT ONE ESSAY
No matter what a person’s interests are, it is important to get involved in communities and organizations that share similar interests. So much of who we are comes from the experiences and people we meet through these communities. Personally, I wouldn’t be anywhere close to the same person I am today without the groups I’ve been involved in throughout my life.
One of the communities I was largely involved in my senior year of high school was the pep club, a large group of students who acted as the student body support system for sports teams. An important factor of any of these communities is how they function and take action. For example, my pep club had meetings every Tuesday. Now on a weekly basis, not every meeting was drastically important, but when considering meetings during times like rival weeks they were highly instrumental. For example, each meeting would typically take about fifteen minutes; however, our rival meeting lasted an hour and had record attendance. So what was so important about this meeting? Well, every meeting typically went the same – pick themes, create cheers, and get the word out to other students - but rival week wasn’t typical. It wasn’t only about who won the game. It was about which schools pep club was better and we had to make sure we were going to be better.
This theme was so important because it was sending a message to our rival school that we were superior. I, being the president, would take theme ideas from students I saw throughout the week before the meeting, narrow them down to the top three choices, and then discuss the options during the meeting at the end of the week. Our rival school’s name is Mosley and their mascot is a dolphin so the top three themes we decided on for this game were “Where’s Waldo: Mosley Edition”, “Bright Out”, and “Dolphins for Dinner”. After discussing ideas on how to pull off each theme with outfits and props, we brought it to a vote and everyone picked their favorite option. “Where’s Waldo: Mosley Edition” won. We decided to go all out and wear the tacky striped stockings and sweaters, and yes, even the big nerdy glasses. As for the opposing team, Mosley’s pep club picked “blackout”.
Typically, every year our rival crushed us in football so the odds weren’t looking great to start out. However, by some miracle our team took the lead early on. Pep club students made up slogans such as “Where’s Mosley?” and “Mosley knew they couldn’t beat us so they wore black for their own funeral,” to make a statement that the great rival team we expected to go up against didn’t show up to play. To my and many others disbelief, our team pulled out an impressive win.
To continue, after picking a theme, we would create cheers designed to show our theme and target the opposing team. This whole event was essentially a competition of which school could burn each other more. We knew that it was going to be raining that night and since Mosley’s mascot is a dolphin we came up with “drown the dolphins,” intended both figuratively and literally. Another thing that enabled us to take a dig at them was their freshman quarterback. Whenever he messed up, we would chant “Where’s Saunders?” as a way to mention that they needed the quarterback they had the year before to come back and take over. There were countless other cheers too. Some even incorporated our cheerleading team and band. One example of this is the “we’ve got spirit” cheer. The pep club, band, and cheer team would join forces to yell at the other team “we’ve got spirit, yes we do, we’ve got spirit, how about you?”. The two rivals would yell this chant back and forth until one was clearly louder than the other. During the game the whole club would yell the cheers as loud as they could to prove to ourselves, our rivals, and to all the other people in attendance that we had more spirit. On a night like rival night, if you didn’t leave voiceless, you weren’t cheering loud enough.
Lastly, at the end of the meetings, everyone in attendance had to get the word out to the rest of the student body. Typically, I used social media and tweeted all the information covered in the meeting and the members would go share my tweet on their profiles. However, rival week was different. Since it was such an important competition of who was going to be better, we wanted to keep our opposing team in the dark about what we decided on for the theme and cheers. So instead, at the rival meeting, everyone got together and created posters to hang around the school. Different pieces of important information were put on different posters – some had the time and place, some had the theme, some had new cheers to learn, and some had costume ideas. We made sure not to put all the information on any one single poster so rival spies wouldn’t be able to snap a quick picture and send it to our opponents. The posters were scattered throughout the school to get the message out to the student body. We placed a poster in every room of every building to ensure that, at some point, every student in the school, even the too cool to have school spirit kids, would be bound to see at least one poster. If the poster got them interested, then they knew to keep an eye out for other posters that might include any more information they needed.
Being involved in this community shaped who I am today. Being in my position of power, it forced be to become a better communicator and leader. Before this club, I was a person who would sit in the back and pray she didn’t get called on. Now I have no issues standing up in front of a group or going around talking to strangers to get them on board. Not only did being in this community help me become a more well-rounded person, it also gave me so many fond memories with friends, old and new, that will last me a lifetime. Whenever I think about home, the memories at these games are what I’m fondest of. I will never forget getting ready in tacky outfits together, the crowd going wild when we got a touchdown, tears being shed when we beat our rivals, and all the little things in between. It’s important for people to get involved in these communities because without even realizing it, each one becomes a part of who they are.