Behind the Scenes Homecoming Week

Whether the halls be filled with grills and burgers, or cheetahs and tour guides, homecoming week is a sight to see. But what goes on behind the scenes of homecoming week? How do those halls become filled with a sea of red and white clothes, superheroes, soccer moms and camouflage? How do the posters hanging in the cafeteria and every hall around the school magically appear on Friday? How does one of the busiest weeks for Masuk come to be? 

Walking into school Friday morning and seeing the posters filled with inspiring words and your name on a sticker is a huge part of spirit week for many students. These things however, do not just appear out of thin air. The answers to the magic behind these posters is the Masuk dance and cheer teams. 

A long standing tradition, members of the cheer team are tasked with creating the posters around the school and hanging them Thursday night before Friday’s pep rally and football game. Senior captain Anne Marie Field describes the effort it takes to create these posters, “We start like a month before and each person gets 3 minimum. We each have a senior, a football player or cheerleader, and a saying. Each poster can take up to like 3 hours to make.” 

The posters of each fall sport and cutouts of each team member is also a job for the cheerleaders. Field continues, “We each cut out a thing of the sport and then we write and decorate them. Then those get hung up with all the other sports. It’s like a month of just straight work.” 

But the work to get the school set up doesn’t stop there. Thursday night, both the dance and cheer team work for hours in attempts to make the school look the best it can: 

“It probably takes five to six hours and that includes our actual practice which is for about an hour as well as the pasta dinner, and then we continue after. In the past, it’s only been cheer, but kind of last year we started to incorporate dance a bit more, so now they help us with decorating,” Field says. 

The hard work of both student government, staff, dance and the cheerleaders, is what is able to make spirit week so memorable. Without them, homecoming week as we know it would cease to exist.