September 27, 2013 at 3:57 p.m.
Spirit Trophy coming back to Rhinelander High School
Spirit Trophy coming back to Rhinelander High School
It's been many years since a class has had the opportunity to win the trophy. Student Council President Destiny Baitinger and Vice President Lizzie Cirilli said the council decided to resurrect the tradition to encourage more participation in the week-long activities planned for homecoming.
"The Spirit Trophy really raises spirit, obviously. I think, with the freshmen being new to the school, and with the underclassmen as well, they tend to get less involved, but if there's a competition, then there's an incentive for them to join in and do festivities that week," Baitinger said.
"We want to get everyone involved and get everyone on the same page that week and to get them all doing something. Not everyone wants to do powderpuff (football), not everyone goes to the dance, but even the kids who aren't in clubs can still do some sort of activity that week now."
The council is hoping the community will get involved as well.
"It's a matter of getting everybody involved on every different level and getting the community involved as well. We love having them. They're always willing to help us out with the parade and donations and the things that they've done for the school, so it's really important to get the community involved so they know that we're really thankful for everything that they do," Baitinger said.
As for the trophy itself, the council is pulling out all the stops. It has created an award that has 24 spots on it.
The winning class will have its name engraved on one of the 24 plaques.
"We have a big trophy this year. It's a legitimate trophy that we have with 24 plaques for 24 years. It'll be engraved so whichever class wins, they'll get on the plaque," Baitinger said.
"It's going to be this cool tradition that we'll have for 24 years. It all starts this year, so it's pretty cool that we get to be initiating it," Cirilli added.
Enthusiasm and level of involvement will ultimately determine which class has its name on the first plaque on the new trophy.
"Every year, we've always had judging for some of the activities like window painting downtown - each class gets a section of a block of Brown Street where the businesses will let us paint on their windows to get the community involved, so we have judges for that. We have judges for door decorating within the school, we have judges for the parade floats for every class," Baitinger said.
"Then, (this) week we'll have games that everybody can do during lunch. A couple students from each class for every lunch shift will take on the game for the day. If they win, they get awarded points for their class. You can also get points from dress up days. Everyone can do something."
"We're also going to have a cheering contest at the pep rally," Cirilli added.
The theme for this year's halftime show is Motown. In another display of unity, the student council decided Motown will be the theme for Spirit Week as well.
"The band's theme for the halftime show is Motown and we have a lot of band members (on the) student council and they thought it'd be really cool if we have Motown as our theme then, too. We normally don't do that, but it's cool to have that uniformity this year," Baitinger said.
"We want everyone to see this is a fresh kind of event for them. We're trying to involve more families and parents in the activities this year. We want it to seem like we're trying to branch out with Spirit Days and with the theme. We're trying to go above and beyond what we've done in the past because we want to progress further. We want to represent our school and be good role models for the student body and show that we have enthusiasm for our school. I think that's contagious and we want to have everyone else follow us, so we want to make it more fun than before," Cirilli added.
Hodag pride should be pouring through the streets by the end of next week, the students said.
"We're very excited," Cirilli said. "It's going to be a fun week," Baitinger added.
Marcus Nesemann may be reached at [email protected].
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