Kaden Wisniowski

After attending many varsity sports events including but not limited to A-day, Winterfest, Friday Night Lights, and countless regular games, one thing has been made crystal clear to me: UCC has no school spirit.

Zero, zilch, nil.

Our “big events” such as A-day, Friday Night Lights, Winterfest, and May Day (if that’s even still a thing) are massive disappointments. A-Day is probably the best out of all of these events. This year’s A-Day drew out decent numbers to the Varsity Football game, but games for all other sports teams were scarcely attended save for a few parents. I attended Friday Night Lights for the first time this year and expected much more from it. There was hardly any noise coming out of the small crowd of UCC students that attended.  

Winterfest is great. Well, it’s great up until half time of the Varsity Basketball game. The Lett Gym experiences a mass exodus after the buzzer sounds to end the 2nd quarter. Some people go to get food; most just don’t come back. A decent crowd comes out to the hockey game later that night, but there could and should be a lot more people there. I’m sure I wasn’t the only person last year who was just a little bit embarrassed by the fact that St. Mikes managed to get just as many fans out to our barn to support the Majors, who if I recall correctly, only had one measly win up to that point of the season. If St. Mikes can get that many fans out to support a last place team in an away game, why can’t we do the same? Our sports teams are dominant across the board, so it’s not like we don’t have anything to cheer for.

There are a few glaring reasons why I think our school spirit is so bad, specifically when it comes to supporting our teams during their games. The excuse that I’ve found myself using the most, and that I’ve heard others use the most is “sorry I can’t come to the game, I have too much work to do”. People need to realize that we all have mountains of work to do all the time (thanks IB), so that isn’t a valid excuse. Next, attendance in the younger grades at varsity games is pretty weak, and I think this could be because they don’t have any friends playing in the games so their interest is lower. This problem could be solved by figuring out ways to get the IDIV more excited about our sports teams. This brings me to my next point: our pep rallies suck. They are essentially regular Friday assemblies minus the – gasp – blue lights and “the gauntlet”, which is really just an excuse for beefy IB2 football players to shove little 80 pound Year 1s’. My suggestion? Pep rallies are moved to the Lett Gym on the bleachers, and last an hour (or maybe longer), and are filled with games and music meant to get us excited for the upcoming games instead of the usual Quiddity prompts and Steward’s Announcements. It’s a pretty simple fix, but I’m sure that interest will increase with these changes. If you disagree with anything that I said, I’d love for you to prove me wrong. There’s nothing I’d like to see more than the Blue Army out in full force at our games.

Come on UCC, let’s step it up. We have so much to be proud of.