Senior Vikings, Mira Bhasin and Malcolm Klingbeil, lead the football student section on Friday, August 31. Kayla Podgurski’19/Media)
On the night of Friday, October 12, I, like many others, braved the cold weather to witness what, in my opinion, was one of the worst student-section performances in recent memory.
To clarify, Upper School students were not doing inappropriate or obscene things at all, and the student section was not poorly behaved. Instead, the lack of enthusiasm and unity that my peers exhibited was one of the most disappointing things I have seen during my time in the Upper School.
The Charlie David Dinner attracts students of all ages to support Academy athletics. Just an hour before the game, the boardwalk in the Jones Gym was packed with student volunteers and fans that would have presumably gone on to cheer our football squad.
Pep Band stayed, even after half-time. Parents stayed. Lower and middle schoolers stayed.
But the stands lacked Upper School supporters and lost more every minute, resulting with a fraction of our usual manpower.
As a spirit leader for our Latin Club and JCL chapter, I am appalled with the way our student sections have been performing this year. My past experiences with spirit, both in our athletic student sections and at Latin conventions, have been overwhelmingly positive. As an underclassman, I looked up to those leading our cheers and hoped to someday lead a crowd like they did. Our cheering squads were energy-packed, vibrant, loud and exciting.
This year, I have found it harder and harder to find the same enthusiasm in our spirit sections that came so naturally in years past. Other students have also complained of a similar disappointment.
The problem clearly isn’t with spirit squad. Malcolm and Mira are two of the most energetic and high-spirited people I know. They have devoted themselves to putting together one of our best spirit squads to date. The seniors who lead do so as best they can, engaging the vast majority of the upperclassmen in the stands and motivating underclassmen to cheer as well.
However, most seniors are quick to denounce the changes to spirit squad, adding underclassmen and diminishing spots for seniors to lead. On the other hand, underclassmen complain more of not feeling like they can participate.
Like it or not, our approach to school spirit needs to dramatically shift to fix this issue.
To start, we need to educate younger students on our cheers, so that they can participate with those who are leading. Senior leadership correctly yells at the freshmen to start cheering when they are unengaged; however, the fact that freshmen might not know how to become engaged is ignored by many. This lack of education has been a poorly-addressed issue in the past as well, but only this year has its effect been so pronounced.
One example of a successful teaching process that I have witnessed was at the NJCL convention this year. Ohio’s delegation participated in a cheer bootcamp before our first spirit competition, getting everyone up to speed on how best they could participate during our daily contests. This organization contributed to Ohio’s second-place finish in overall spirit for large states that week. Everyone could participate in spirit because they knew how to.
If spirit squad leadership took time to teach underclassmen and new students these cheers, there would be no excuse for them not to cheer, and they would naturally be more engaged. There is more than enough time during our average assembly to take a couple of minutes and teach students a cheer or two, and maybe the energy this builds will wake them up on a particularly rough Monday.
The seniors who aren’t leading are at fault more than senior leadership. During all of the home football games this year, clusters of seniors, totaling almost a quarter of the senior class and a higher proportion of seniors attending, abandoned the student section in favor of camping out on the track and not cheering along with their fellow Vikings. These seniors, who are expected to lead by example, hurt our student section in 2 ways.
First, they diminished our manpower and organization. The students with the most experience abandoned the student section in favor of hanging out with their friends, mostly choosing not to use their time on the track to lead cheers but to avoid them, picking conversation over participation.
Second, they indirectly showed underclassmen that it is okay to not cheer along with everyone else and discouraged those who were leading spirit squad from heading up cheers. By displaying their passivity towards the student section and preventing those who were elected to cheer from doing so, these seniors enabled freshmen and others to glean that cheering isn’t enjoyable.
These seniors are a poor example of what a student section should look like. Even during home games, our opponents’ fanbase surpasses our own, showing incredible organization and dedication from everyone, not just those leading. Much to my frustration and to the way we represent our school, these seniors are turning our backs on our players when they need it most, and doing so in a self-destructive and entitled way.
They are also discouraging the advancement of a relatively new tradition. A formal spirit squad has only formed within the past 5 years at Academy, yet its fall seems imminent when a large portion of the student section chooses to ignore them.
This should not be the case. Spirit should be inclusive and overwhelmingly positive, not alienating, uncomfortable and fragmented.
A dramatic overhaul is necessary to repair our broken system.
The natural initial step is to fix our issues with the senior class. The seniors who did not participate should move back into the student section, giving it bulk and allowing the leadership to make each chant louder and more powerful. This will also encourage the underclassmen leaders to motivate their grades from the front of the pack.
Following this, the leaders of the spirit squad should take initiative to educate underclassmen on our chants, helping them feel more included in the spirit process.
Finally, the student body as a whole needs to adopt a new attitude towards spirit. People by and large tend not to cheer at Academy for fear of being seen as odd or crude. This is not the case at all. Although I concede that cheering totally makes a fool out of oneself, this is not a bad thing. Once you are able to laugh at how absurd what you’re doing really is, it becomes so much more enjoyable, not just for you, but for everyone around you, bringing the positive energy that cheering is supposed to provide. Cheering in a student section has provided me with some of the most wonderful experiences in my high school career, and I can only hope that others approach it with such enthusiasm.
In the immortal words of our Vikings, past, present, and future, “V! I! K-E-S! Let’s go Vikes!”
