Spirit Week is exactly like it sounds. A week where the whole student body gets together to celebrate the SJA school spirit. It is filled with exciting activities and crazy dress down days throughout the week. It is one of the most anticipated weeks of the school year.

This year Spirit Club started out the week with the event where school spirit is celebrated the most, a pep rally. The school got to show their appreciation for the fall athletes participating in either track & field, soccer, or lacrosse.

The first day of the week was salad day. The seniors wore togas for “caesar dressing”, the junior with cowboy hats for “ranch dressing,” the sophomores with aprons for “chef salad,” and the freshmen with leis for “thousand island.” There was even karaoke during lunch where even some of the exchange students from Canada and Taiwan got to show off their skills.

On Wednesday, the students dressed up as one of SJA’s favorite celebrities, Adam Sandler, while playing some spikeball during lunch.

Thursday, each girl found a partner and paired up to put together a duo costume while one of SJA’s favorite spirit week activities, the dunk tank, was available to dunk the students’ favorite teachers and students during lunch. The last day of spirit week was themed “country vs. country club”, and students either grabbed their tennis skirts or their denim while playing human foosball and jousting with their friends in the beautiful weather.

Ms. Hailey Meersman, math teacher and Spirit Club Moderator, loves having all the fun activities during lunch like the inflatable jousting and foosball.

“My favorite part of spirit week is choosing which inflatables to order each year. There are so many fun ones to choose between, so we’ll have plenty to work with over the next few years. But the hardest part is staying within our budget. We only have the money we make from selling sweatshirts, and the dunk tank and inflatables are expensive,” Ms. Meersman said.

There are weeks of planning that go into perfecting each day of Spirit Week. After everyone a part of the Spirit Week team came up with ideas they sent out a form to the students to get their opinions on what they wanted. This allowed for them to have their own personal touch on Spirit Week. Every year Spirit Club tries to improve this annual exciting week to give the students an entertaining week to look forward to after their spring break.

Sophomore Lydia Wiley got to experience her first Spirit Week as a Spirit Club officer this year and loved seeing everything that goes into the planning.

“The planning process was so much fun. We met many times before spirit week and we started planning very ahead so we could take our time with our ideas. We discussed how we could make it as fun as possible because the point of spirit week is for the students to have fun and enjoy themselves. During spirit week, everything went great and from what I saw everyone had a lot of fun and really enjoyed themselves,” Lydia said.

Spirit Week this year was a hit. It served its purpose as a week to allow the student body to come together and enjoy a week of crazy wacky activities and dress down days. It also seemed to have given the students one last boost of energy to get them through the rest of the school year.