For many years, Kearsley High School has had a spirit cup competition for the entirety of Homecoming week. One of the many challenges students can win is the float-building contest.
The premise is students will take their class theme and create a unique float based on that. This year’s homecoming theme was “Under the Sea” which left a lot of room for creativity!
The senior class was given the prompt of shipwrecks/pirates. Senior Gibby Hudkins was the team lead for the float. When asked why they gave some backstory, “Alyvia [senior class president] asked me to. It started with the banner in sophomore year and I just became in charge of it.”
This has worked in the senior’s favor as the last two years they have been the winners, however, this year was a blow to them when the freshman took first place and they received second.
Reporters asked what the biggest challenge was that caused this downfall and senior, Sam Springsteen said, “challenges were finding people, but also finding things for people to do because when you have a set idea, it’s hard getting people to understand a specific idea. Time management was also an issue. It was difficult and we were behind where we wanted to be.”
Both Hudkins and Springsteen were the main workers on this float and agreed that the timing was complicated. The seniors were hoping to have two weeks for the float however according to Springsteen, “we started week of.” This was due to the fact they couldn’t get access to the frame for the float, which was needed to measure out the ship and hornet they created.
The junior class was given the prompt of coral reef. Junior, Alejandra Cash wanted to paint a picture of what you would see in the sea. She explained she wanted to portray, “the coral reef you see when snorkeling.”
To add, junior Savannah Rupert wanted to include all the colorful aspects of the ocean. The ocean is full of different kinds of life such as sea creatures and beautiful plants. The inspiration was truly endless.
Both juniors said the biggest challenge was figuring out where to put everything. Cash remarked, “it was windy on homecoming so we also had to figure out how to make it stay.”
When asked what the timeline for their float looked like, Rupert explained, “they spent a total of 8+ hours on it.” However, the juniors also spent a month collecting donations and supplies for their colorful float.
Despite this effort, the juniors came in fourth place. They were simply glad to show off their creative skills and collaborate with their classmates.
The sophomore class was given the prompt of mermaids. Of course, mermaids are a huge hit with all generations. It was no challenge to find inspiration, Sophomore Emma McCormick said, “we got a lot of inspiration from random Google and Pinterest pictures.”
The sophomores took a silly take on their mermaids for their banner, sticking Principal Wiskur’s face onto them. Their float consisted of three mermaids all in a magical undersea landscape.
Sophomore Nicole Naragon said she participated because, “I’m class president so it’s a little bit of a you gotta, you have to kinda work on the float.”
Reporters asked what their biggest challenge was and McCormick said, “participation. Like nobody wanted to show up, the same six people showed up every day.” Naragon added to her thought, “the float is a lot of separate pieces. Once we got to the end it was kinda we had to finish a part before we could continue on, it was just kinda we had people at the end but we couldn’t give them jobs cause we had to complete one thing.” This was similar to the seniors issue.
Regardless both girls told reporters they spent six days on the project, and that work earned them third place overall!
The freshman class was given the prompt of sea creatures.
Reporters asked freshman Conner Langworthy what his inspiration was for the float. “We kinda had some outside help and we wanted to go for the main theme under the sea. We had sea creatures so we wanted to replace the hornet with something that would sting, like the jellyfish, so the jellyfish stinging the Linden eagle,” stated Langworthy.
This creative idea ended with them getting first place with their stunning spinning jellyfish.
Finding help was no easy task according to Langworthy. He stated, “I felt like we had no help anyways, I felt like it was all put on me. My friend Zack, who is vice president, we had no help it was mainly up to us.”
The freshman said they were unable to find a spot to actually construct their jellyfish and by the time it came down to it, they were only able to spend about twelve hours on it.
For their first year the freshmen started with a bang.
Each float this year was creative and well worked on. Students cannot wait to see the work of these students next year and the class of 2028’s future float.
