Students rejoice return to cheering sections in Bay Area
The first quarter was a little more than halfway over when Adrianna Brown’s preparations began to pay off. St. Francis classmate Matthew Dougherty Jr, had just hauled in the touchdown that gave the Lancers their first lead of an eventual upset of perennial power De La Salle.
Brown and five other senior leaders purchased some $100 worth of baby powder before the game — a tradition for whiteouts in the St. Francis “Rage Cage.” Now, the band was playing and her view was obscured by white clouds of talcum.
“It seemed like one of those TV or movie moments like in the football games in Friday Night Lights,” Brown recalled last week, as St. Francis prepares for its first game since the shocking win. “That’s when it started to feel real and back to normal for me.”
Packing into cheering sections for the first time in two years, students across the Bay Area are having their own made-for-tv moments (or, hey, at least the yearbook). Chants, cheers and traditions have returned with a new vigor after vanishing last season because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A week later, De La Salle players were on the other side as Charles Greer raced toward the end zone, past the pylons and straight into the students behind the goal posts. He was mobbed by the crowd, dressed all in black for that night’s theme.
Seniors who graduated last spring missed out on their opportunity to lead cheering sections. This fall, two classes of students — freshmen and sophomores — are being indoctrinated to this seminal high school experience for the first time.
This year’s seniors aren’t letting that chance get away.
“It was electric,” said De La Salle senior Jay Hawkins, who helped organize the blackout and was in the front rows. “The underclassmen hadn’t experienced that yet. We want to give back to them what they missed. We wanted to hand that down to them.”
When classes commenced this fall, only eight students had signed up for the extracurricular leadership class at De La Salle. But then Hawkins and fellow senior Will Craft reached out to the program’s adviser, Greg Brown-davis, about reigniting the Spartans’ student section. Coming out of a pandemic, they wanted to renew a sense of community, they said.
Now, 40 students opt to stay af- ter school most days planning ways to engage their classmates, one of their top priorities being the student section (recently dubbed the “Bounce House” after going incognito until now, inspired by the University of Central Florida).
Last game was the blackout. Up next is a national showcase on ESPN, when St. Frances Academy of Baltimore visits Concord tonight.
“We’ve got a couple tricks up our sleeve,” Hawkins said. “I think the bounce house will be bouncing.”
With the Spartans multiplying Monterey Trail’s score eight or nine times over in the fourth quarter of their first home game this fall, the bleachers in the east end zone were as packed as ever.
“Unheard of,” said Brown-davis, who’s also an assistant coach on the football team.
Hawkins estimated the engagement among his peers is “like 10 times better,” than even prior to the pandemic.
At St. Francis, the hallways are still buzzing after the Lancers’ win over De La Salle, Brown said.
The “Rage Cage” moniker is a little more entrenched than De La Salle’s new “Bounce House” slogan. It originated at basketball games in the 1980s, when Brown’s father was a student on the Mountain View campus.
Hawkins and Craft were in attendance for the Spartans’ loss in Mountain View.
They witnessed the “Rage Cage” firsthand and walked away impressed, even a little inspired (after allowing the soreness of the loss to heal).
They are anxiously awaiting a shipment of white rally towels, custom printed and sponsored by a local business. Turn on ESPN tonight or look to the east end zone, and you’ll know whether they arrived in time.