Whether it is a home sports game, a pep rally, Homecoming week or just a run-of-the-mill spirit day, Gibson Southern knows how to bring the spirit and hype. Student Council typically kicks off Homecoming with a week full of spirit days with themes ranging from U.S.A. to Gold Rush. The new Titan Up! club also helps with bringing spirit by hosting games at pep rallies and keeping the Spirit Wars going between the classes.
For the most part, Student Council is in charge of coming up with the Fall and Winter Homecoming week themes. For the Fall Homecoming game theme, the seniors chose gold rush, and Student Council chose other spirit days to fill in the rest of the week.
“We tried to work with the seniors who were picking the themes for the football game,” Student Council co-sponsor Kara Martin said. “We tried to play off of what they picked for Homecoming night, which was the gold, and then we built a theme and went from that.”
Outside of Student Council and the Homecoming weeks, Titan Up!, a newly formed student-led club, solely focuses on bringing spirit to Gibson Southern. They have already helped with games at the pep rally and getting gold crowns to pass out at the football game against Henderson County, among other activities. With it being student-led, the students bring ideas to the sponsor, Melissa Matsel, who decides whether it can be done.
“It is the students who come up with it,” Matsel said. “Mainly the seniors, they get together and say, ‘These are what we want to do.’ They’ll bring it to me, [and] I’ll make sure everything is good with it.”
They then make sure that they have popular spirit days such as maroon and gold, pink out and others. After that, they send out the spirit week days via the weekly calendar, e-news and the TVs around the school.
Titan Up! is also taking over the class Spirit Wars that had their inaugural run this past school year. Last year, counts for Spirit War dress up days were done during the first period of the day. Due to several juniors and seniors out of the school due to classes at the Southern Indiana Career and Technical Center, the Creating Entrepreneurial Opportunities program in Princeton and Work Base Learning, Titan Up! is planning on trying to get the count to a different period so that more students can be counted towards their classes’ total number of students participating in the spirit days.
Senior Ryan Spink is a senior who helps Titan Up! decide on the themes it should do and help brainstorm ideas to use to bring spirit to the school.
“We look at what spirit days have done well in the past, what students have so they don’t have to go buy anything and what the school office can help buy for the student section and the school,” he said.
Despite Titan Up! being a newer club at the school, it has still made a large impact on the spirit at Gibson Southern, especially in the student section, More students come to show up and support their school by participating in the spirit days.
Though not all students may think dressing up for non-Titan themed days brings spirit, Matsel, Martin and Spink all disagree. They all think that spirit days are more about representing the school and supporting it as well.
“I think it’s important to have pride in your school and to show support for your school,” Spink said. “I’ve been doing it since I came here, and to me, I just feel like it’s one of the most important parts. You get to be at the school, you get to represent your school, so why not do it?”
Overall, whether it’s at a home football game or even in the classroom leading up to a game, students should be participating in order to contribute to their class’s Spirit War points so they can take part in the prize that will be received at the end of the year.”
