Normally, Spirit Week acts as a prelude to homecoming weekend, where alumni get to come back to Flint Hill while athletic games fill the day. As a result of current events, the time previously serving as the finale to Spirit Week, Homecoming, has been canceled. In other cases, Spirit Week, serving its purpose mainly as an introduction to the main event of homecoming, would have been canceled with its purpose no longer being to be served. Yet, Flint Hill has used the opportunity to offer a unique experience that still captures much of the essence that students have come to expect from Homecoming and Spirit Week. 

This year’s Spirit Week included both new and old features in the usual Spirit dress days and newly added messages from alumni. Despite being somewhat condensed compared to the typical Homecoming fairs, these events helped satiate some of the desire for homecoming events in a year in which they could not be held. 

As a newly added feature to Spirit Week, alumni videos helped capture some of the actual ‘homecoming’ feelings usually associated with Spirit Week. Alumni like Ratna Gill (class of 2011) and John Osborn (class of 2013) shared insightful messages about their experiences while at Flint Hill. 

Osborn, now a Music Producer and Engineer and Gill now a public policy student at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, noted the importance of taking meaningful risks, stating “In order to fully realize our goals we can not fear failure.”

The comments from the alumni asserted that during these difficult times, students should look at the current situation and look for ways to adapt and grow as people. This same need for adaptation was seen in the themed dress days, where the school needed to think of a way for Spirit Week activities to be accommodated for the new online setting. 

Themes for dress days included into the jungle, decades, wacky tacky, and jerseys. The themes were able to easily mimic the feeling of a typical Spirit Week whilst allowing students to participate regardless of if they were learning online or in person. Decades day even further expanded on the usual Spirit Week themes, through giving students a larger variety in choice students could add some creativity to their dress.  

Students, such as Junior Marc Sipher, thought the Spirit Dress helped keep spirits high in a time where many events were being canceled. “Normally, I wasn’t one to care too much about events like Homecoming, but you realize how important they are when things are being canceled left and right,” Sipher said. He then noted how Spirit Dress helped him feel like things were just a bit more normal. He said, “Little things like the Spirit Dress this year helped me feel better about things. Everything still feels a bit off with the whole Pandemic. It helped to know that with some change here and there, we could still have some of the events we usually had.”

Sipher’s statements largely echoed other students this past week. Although these Spirit Week events are seemingly small, they helped give some semblance of normality to a time that’s anything but normal. Hopefully, there’s something to be learned from all of this in that it’s often the little things that we miss most once we realize they’re gone.