Recently, Mira Costa’s choirs have begun learning the Mira Costa Alma Mater to be sung at football games. The fact that most students don’t know the song or even recognize it when the band plays it exposes the underlying lack of spirit most students have for Mira Costa.
School spirit is a difficult presence to quantify but easy to sense. It isn’t foreign to Costa’s campus, but it has been increasingly hard to come by in recent years. As a former administrator for our rival high school (Redondo Union), Principal Ben Dale has noted that school spirit at Mira Costa is curiously low for a school that excels in athletics and academics.
What prevents Costa students from shouting their pride for the world to hear, from dressing up for events, or from being as rabid fans of the Mustangs as they are of their beloved Lakers? While most of us don’t necessarily choose to come to Mira Costa as we would a university, there is a “tradition of excellence” (to borrow from our champion girls volleyball team) that is reflected across every dimension of the Mira Costa experience.
The only way to change this culture of apathy is to generate more opportunities for Mustangs to show their spirit and create an atmosphere where it is both easy and fun to do so. Spirit must be not just palpable but infectious, and that kind of environment can be achieved through smaller-scale actions.
When it comes to athletics, the Stampede is a great tool, but most students don’t know how it works. To go from being a word on a T-shirt to including the whole student body, the Stampede needs some real structure. The shirts should reflect a professional level of design and should be sold in the student store. There should be a student section of Waller Stadium and a fight song to sing.
These aren’t difficult measures to be taken, but ASB and the administration needs to make them happen. If the Stampede was an organized group, it could make the experience of Costa athletics events as exciting as college or professional events. By making the mascot more involved in the game, organizing tailgates, bringing back celebrity alumni and even selling snacks up and down the stands, more students would attend the games. Also, the student store should be open every day selling Mira Costa apparel.
A strong majority of students surveyed reported that they feel pride in their grade and in individual organizations like MUN, drama, football and so forth, but that needs to be channeled into representing the school as a whole. To encourage unifying the two, many public schools set up a club rush day for students to connect with communities of like-minded kids and hold massive competitions between grades for spirit week.
It is this kind of creative programming, in combination with traditional events like Powder Puff and Scholar Quiz, that can get students to express the school spirit that our school so sorely lacks.
ASB puts in a tremendous amount of planning and hard work, but it will be wasted if students don’t know about the events and activities that feed off of increased school spirit. To increase publicity, events should be publicized across a variety of media from the school web site to Twitter and Facebook to Mustang Morning News.
The baseball team uses Twitter to communicate its schedule. Jane Lofton similarly promotes the library, and individual students regularly make Facebook events for sports games. It is this interactive publicity that the school needs to adopt officially.
Many students need to be sold on the idea of going to an event, so student government representatives could increase attendance and buzz for events with more frequent and charismatic homeroom visits.
ASB does a lot of valuable work to try to get students involved in school events, but it can’t do it alone and can’t keep to the status quo. Our school’s leadership needs more energy and creativity to increase students involvement in school events, but as a community we need to be willing to buy into spirit as something that can be fun, rewarding, and even cool.
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