John Champe SCA held Spring Spirit Week from April 15 to 19, and on that Friday, SCA held the Challenge of Champions pep rally. This was the last spirit week of the school year and the theme was Knights Radio; SCA collaborated with Champe’s Sources of Strength class to create a spirit week on why mental health is important.
The spirit days were built around the Sources of Strength color wheel. Each color represents a different topic, red: mental health, green: mentors, yellow: friends, orange: family support, blue: physical activity, and purple: spirituality.
“I really enjoyed collaborating with the Sources of Strength class,” SCA member Madison Wilson said. “They did a great job jumping into everything we normally do and they helped out everywhere they could.”
SCA chose to collaborate with Sources of Strength to bring new ideas to spirit days and have more people giving opinions on what spirit day themes could be.
“We wanted to collaborate with SOS because we thought it would be a great experience and it allowed more voices to give ideas for spirit week creation,” Class of 2025 President and SCA member Darby Hamilton said. “It also combined two of the biggest groups at Champe to work together.”
Sources of Strength is led by Ms. Ryann Perriello, she also teaches World History 1 and AP Psychology at John Champe High School.
“So I’ve been at John Champe for 7 years. I started in 2017,” Perriello said, “and I started teaching Sources of Strength in 2019.”
This was the first time Sources of Strength did a spirit week collaboration with another bg name at Champe. SOS has done spirit week stuff on their own in past school years but not with another class.
“I think overall it went pretty well, it had its ups and downs, but for the first time doing it it went pretty well,” Perriello said. “It was nice to have the boost from SCA where we could spread the message a little bit more about SOS.”
Getting everything to work efficiently and smoothly during pep rallies is one of the hardest things. There are over 1700 kids and staff members all in condensed spaces yelling and talking so it’s hard to be efficient and smooth on transitions.
“The hardest part of the pep rally is getting class councils to make sure they have all their people who are participating in the games ready and knowing the order of all the games,” Hamilton said. “If there was a way to make this process much easier, it would help the pep rally run as smoothly and simply as possible.”
The pep rally was about an hour and ten minutes long and there were a lot of games between all the classes and teachers. The winners of the Spring spirit week were the seniors with 421 points, the staff in second place with 416 points, and the juniors in third with 397 points.
SCA wanted to make the final spirit week meaningful and put a lot of time and effort into working with SOS to make this spirit week happen.
“This spirit week took a lot of time to plan because we were working with our collaborator SOS and we had to make sure with everything we were doing we incorporated the SOS’s needs,” Hamilton said, “which made it a lot harder, but we were able to pull through an amazing week and event.”
