Homecoming disappoints many

On September 10, the first homecoming dance on the football field took place. Leaving the class of 2022 and 2023 as the only classes currently enrolled who have seen a traditional homecoming.

 My freshman and sophomore year the homecoming dance was held in the upper and lower student center, and in the past it has also been inside of the tennis house. Once the dance got more popular and the student attendance grew, it had to be moved into the school building to accommodate more people. This year, assuming this is because of COVID-19 precautions, the dance was held outside, immediately after the football game, on the turf field.

The timing of the event was one of the new unfamiliar changes. Any other year students would come to the school late on saturday evenings and line up outside the school. The line takes up the whole width of a hallway and takes an extensive amount of time to get through because of the breathalyzing.

The football field event was held after the game on a Friday. This made it difficult for kids to go home and get ready, especially if they had after school activities to attend and were going to support the football team. If a student had all of these things to do and came into school that morning, their day may have been over 16 hours long. 

Holding the dance outside was reasonable because of the rising COVID-19 cases and the lack of vaccination requirements at school and athletic events. Nevertheless, the informal nature of the school sponsored dance, a highly anticipated event after last year’s cancellation, was disappointing. 

Students were told to wear casual attire, which ended up meaning wear whatever you had on at the football game: the student section theme was jerseys. The end result was a few hundred kids in various sport jerseys, walking around the track and ending up underneath the football goalposts. There was a DJ with a large group of “dancing” students gathered around him. 

The food that was provided was not seen by most people, including me, until they were walking out of the dance and included random bags of chips, Rice Krispies Treats, fruit snacks, and water jugs that looked like they were taken off of the bench that the football teams were just on. Chick-fil-A sandwiches were rumored to have been provided but seemingly ran out very quickly.

The efforts of the student council were clearly seen but that did not stop the whole event from being disappointing. I hope that next year’s seniors get to have a better experience at their last homecoming, and maybe our grad dance will be a little more exciting.