In America, the concept of a “spirit week” made its debut at a school in Palo Alto, California at some point in the 1950s and was initially called “Friendship Week.” Friendship Week was created to forge community and welcome students back for a new school year. The underlying goal was to encourage camaraderie through team-building celebrations. The week was officially renamed “Spirit Week” in 1977 and usually took place during the fall leading up to homecoming. It also culminated in some form of pep rally.
In present-day Fieldston, Spirit Week has been kept alive since the 70s and continues to thrive whenever its presence returns.
This year’s edition of Spirit Week began on Tuesday, September 24 and continued through Friday, September 27. In line with its historic tradition, Spirit Week led up to the universally loved pep rally on Friday which preceded all of the homecoming sports events the next day– Saturday. On Tuesday, Supervisors of Fun Times Reanna Bilbao and Lily Burnside kicked off the week with a pajama dress up, since “we [didn’t] have school on Monday—we’re start[ing] off simple on Tuesday.” They demanded that students not wear sweatpants, denim or leggings–which certainly yielded some interesting outfits on campus. Supervisors even inspired Spirit Week’s themes by making each day’s ideal outfit from the infamous Roblox game “Dress to Impress.” The images were so perfectly dressed they had Form VI students like Patrick Kisling asking, “Who is this diva?”
For Wednesday, the dress-up theme moved to Wild West, in which Bilbao and Burnside provided a cowboy emoji or “an image from Pinterest” as inspiration. Yee-haw biddies. On Thursday, freshmen, sophomores and juniors were specifically asked to wear plain black outfits. Seniors, in literal contrast to everyone else, were told to go all out in neon colors. Some seniors expressed their inner neon through wristbands, sunglasses and boots–while others wore all green, including some instances of iconic BRAT merch by Charli xcx. This set the dramatic tone for Friday morning’s theme of blue and orange (or any ECFS gear). On that very morning, seniors cleared a path between the middle school and the high school. But this wasn’t just any old yellow brick road…in keeping with Fieldston tradition, any underclassmen or faculty risked potentially getting sprayed with silly string, shaving cream and even hair dye.
Miriam Paterson, history teacher extraordinaire and Chair of the History Department, leaned into the chaos by going through this pathway and got absolutely sprayed! It’s this type of communal fun that makes Spirit Week so important for the upper school and gives seniors a final taste of mischief in the name of fun. In a sense, Spirit Week is not just about a new school year and welcoming students. It’s also about looking back on your full experience of high school and realizing the bonding that can occur in a strong community.
The pep rally is the cherry on top of the hysteria that is Spirit Week. It’s the event that gets students hyped before homecoming. This year, Spirit Week began with a performance from the elusive and consummate Percussion Ensemble, composed of seniors drumming their hearts out for ten nonstop minutes. This performance was followed by the sports teams’ choreographed dances, which lasted from five to seven minutes each. Each performance consisted of the perfect amount of bravura and sassiness needed—accompanied by a mix of different songs by artists ranging from Mozart to Sexyy Red. For example, the Girls Varsity Field Hockey team danced their hearts out to 2000s hits and praised their team captains while the Varsity Football team left the audience audibly gasping when Carnival by Kanye West blared out…wowza! Some of this sassiness definitely paid off as the varsity Eagles emerged only one point behind rival Dalton at homecoming. Better luck next year. Girls Varsity Field Hockey sailed to win and so did some of the other sports teams while the Girls Varsity Tennis game got canceled for the third year in a row. All in all, Spirit Week shows us that the spirit of Fieldston is alive and well. Go Eagles!
