Embracing Lancer Spirit: How students at East show school spirit

Holding a single white board up to the crowd during a varsity basketball game, pep executive and senior Collin Ford had written the simple phrase “Bananas at 4:15,” but everyone in the student section knew what was coming. When the game clock finally matched the board, only a few words could be heard clearly in the crowded gymnasium.

“Go bananas, go go bananas!”

But a few voices stood above the rest — the pep execs, a group of six seniors appointed each year to promote school events, engage the student section by leading school chants and building school spirit at East’s quarterly pep rallies.

“I think there’s a kind of art to it,” Ford said. “Just feeling out the situation, it kind of took me a while because I’m not a big basketball person. But after going to enough games, I kind of figured out when it was appropriate to start chants.”

These games would not be the same without the Pep Club, creating a sense of community at East. After a full year of wearing the blue-and-white-striped overalls, the pep execs reflect on the impact they’ve had at East and how they are preparing the juniors who will take over next year.

For Ford, being part of Pep Club is about more than just attending every sporting event. It’s about using their influence in the student section to help the team, even if they’re on the sidelines.

“We’ve tried to focus a lot of our effort into making games exciting and garner some more engagement from the student section,” Ford said.

Compared to last year’s pep execs, Ford and the others have more than tripled their social media posts on their Instagram account, @smepepclub, according to Ford. This goes beyond the usual gameday post, including coordinating with the student store for gameday merchandise like the “Beat Rock” shirt they made for East’s annual basketball game against Rockhurst High School.

Pep exec, former student store manager and senior Caroline Reiser planned to design merchandise to commemorate the game when the club finalized the theme in December. The store immediately saw a surge in orders for the shirts after they were announced on Instagram, according to Reiser.

“I think the beat rock shirts are just a fun tradition that people look forward to,” Reiser said. “I can wear it to the game and have something that everyone else is wearing and then you can keep it, not even just part of the theme, but a memory of the year.”

The rise in social media, spearheaded by Reiser and fellow pep exec and senior Clarie Schudy, has been Pep Club’s way to get their faces out there and make themselves approachable to students.

“If you’re seeing things being reposted and seeing your sport being advertised or promoted, that’s just something that people know in the back of their head,” Reiser said. “We also wanted to make sure that people knew our faces so that they could come with questions about a theme or if they need to travel for games.”

Seeing the whole school involved in the game day themes or attending events like varsity football and basketball helps bring the school together, and the school spirit gets everyone excited, even if they don’t know the rules, according to Reiser. 

“I’m not a sports person at all,” Reiser said. “But the reason that I kept going back to games and wanting to be involved, and this sounds corny, is the environment of it. The lights on the field, the band playing and everybody cheering next to you. The atmosphere of high school sports is something that has its own kind of aura to it.”

Preparing next year’s pep execs, Ford and Reiser are optimistic they can get the new execs up to speed for next year — teaching them all the school’s complex cheers and how to plan the quarterly pep assemblies — especially considering they personally selected the new execs who applied and interviewed for the position earlier this semester.

“When we talk to these people, we imagine them sitting down and typing out a script for a pep assembly or emailing administration to get [an event] approved or reaching out to the teachers who have a club to be able to communicate when their next meeting is,” Reiser said. “There are certain types of people who you can just tell based on talking to them that they are responsible and that they can pick up their own slack.”

Attending more games than ever this year, Reiser has learned just how much East has to offer even with events people may not have attended before. Watching varsity athletes in the auditorium cheering at the top of their lungs for the Lancer Dancers after their Spring Show showed her just how big the impact of school spirit was at East. 

“I will miss seeing the people around me at games and getting so excited about their classmates doing well and just celebrating everybody’s wins,” Reiser said. “Seeing people wanting to celebrate their classmates is a really cool and special thing that our school does a really good job of.”

The SME Student Store — a school spirit store run by senior marketing students — creates East-related merchandise that students can purchase during lunch or on their website.

But what they’re most known for is their game-related merchandise. For big rivalry games, the store makes shirts or jerseys that students wear during the games. Here are two products they’ve made this year.