Shouts, stomps and applause warmed the chilly weather as students cheered for their class from the bleachers. Seniors remain in the lead after the third Spirit Week rally during lunch at Palo Alto High School’s Viking Stadium.
The teachers opened up the rally with an energetic dance to the latest hits, including “Golden” from “KPop Demon Hunters.”
According to Samuel Howles-Banerji, science and AP research teacher, the dance was a good way to involve teachers in Spirit Week and show students they appreciated the activities as well.
“It’s really nice to get the teachers out and participating because it amplifies the student presence,” Howles-Banerji said. “Often teachers seem like they are sort of not happy about Spirit Week because it distracts from classwork, so it’s important to show students that we actually are excited about it and we’re excited that you’re excited.”
Howles-Banerji said the dance was enjoyable to participate in and also felt very with the trends.
“It was a really fun dance this year and short and easy enough to learn,” Howles-Banerji said. “I also liked that it was super timely because of ‘KPop Demon Hunters,’ which I finally watched last night because I was like, ‘I need to watch this movie so I know why everybody is so excited about this dance.’”
Following the dance performance, students participated in two games: a relay race and tug-of-war. Sophomores and seniors advanced to the final round for both games, where they came head-to-head to each other in two close matches. At the end, seniors pulled through victorious in both games, earning 3,000 points for their class.
Max Nicole, senior participant in the relay race, said that he expected nothing less of the senior class.
“It was amazing,” Nicole said. “I loved the energy and we knew we were going to win from the start, so we weren’t very surprised. It was good to see how many kids came out.”
According to Courtney Taylor, junior class senator, the Associated Student Body put an intense effort in curating game ideas for the rallies.
“The games are extensively planned to make sure everything goes well, we run through them and the process behind them is just a lot of research,” Taylor said. “The Spirit Commissioners went to a conference where they spoke about spirit games, so they took ideas from different schools, and it’s all a very collaborate process.”
According to Jordan Johnsson, sophomore tug-of-war participant, the games help student interactions between grades and encourage their peers to show their spirit in the future.
“Everyone will be more comfortable with each other, watching older years and younger years participating in Spirit Week, so then people the next year or next day will participate a lot more,” Johnsson said.
Currently, the Spirit Week scoreboard is as follows:
17,100 pts for seniors
15,100 pts for juniors
14,400 pts for sophomores
11,500 pts for freshmen
