A Farewell Rally on the football field

Amid the cheering rally-goers, buoyant gamers and eager performers, one would almost forget there’s something gravely disparate about the final rally of the year — it was held outside.

Accommodating for the construction inside and around the gym, the area closed off for the time being, ASB resorted to holding the Farewell Rally in the only other location with bleachers: the upper field, stationing freshmen on the far right of the home bleachers, sophomores far left, juniors mid-right and seniors mid-left.

According to 2019 Vice President Anisha Sinha, the rally was still successful despite the unique setting.

“I am very surprisingly pleased with it. It went really well,” Sinha said. “I don’t think there was a point when it was like, ‘Wow. Because of the upper field, this rally is going poorly.’”

However, she and others still prefer the traditional Farewell Rally, reminiscing upon the scenes they remember from previous Farewell Rallies, some of which were able to have happened only in the gym.

“I remember in my freshman year when it was my sister’s final rally, they played See You Again and they did the whole iPhone lights with the flashing,” senior Pallavi Sripathi said. “It was really sad and people cried, and I felt more nostalgic and I feel like having it on the field took away a lot from the decoration and the art and the feeling and sense of community that normally is there with a rally.”

As a result of the unique location, changes were also made to the organization of the rally. Poster-making, a type of preparation unique to rallies, typically takes a two week toll on many students in leadership and ASB, requiring about two hours every day after school leading up to the rally, according to Sinha. While some classes did create their own ‘mini-posters’ to keep in light their rally spirit, traditional poster-making was omitted from the rally since there was nowhere to hang them.

With the field also came the turf, and with the turf came some setbacks for performances, preventing Cheer and Song from making their traditional appearances as they require a smoother and more stable platform. However, Andaaz and Bhangra still performed, as well as Marquesas and Spirit.

To accommodate for the fewer performances as well as the field’s wide arena, visual-heavy games were planned to allow the entire audience to see. ASB IDC Representative Andrea Chang acknowledges that visual appeal was ASB’s go-to tactic when organizing the rally.

“I’m going to keep going back to visuals,” Chang said. “Honestly, that’s like the one thing we planned around. Just games. Because we know the one thing that hypes people up are performances and games… So instead of doing relays and stuff like that, we decided to do really big games that people could see from afar and they can know what is going on.”

As far as future rallies go, Sinha, Sripathi and Chang unanimously agree that the heart of MVHS rallies should remain inside the main gym, and future rallies will continue to take place in their traditional location despite the success of this rally.

Sinha, future ASB Vice President, will, however, still consider locating another rally on the upper field.

“I think definitely for [future] winter rallies, it’s something that we could try and make very game oriented,” Sinha said. “This time, we did have three rally games and I thought it gave more people a chance to participate in the rally games.”

Regardless of the location of future rallies or this final rally for the Class of 2018 seniors, the spirit of the Farewell Rally remained, reminding many seniors of their legacies at MVHS.

“2018 – we’re awesome as we are, and I think that, especially this year, we did pull through, and we [made] some changes and we participated more [in rallies],” Sripathi said. “And I think that it makes me proud to be [a part of the class of] 2018.”