On Friday Jan. 9, the annual Winter Rally took place in the Big Gym during academy. Filled with singing, team competition, and a senior dodgeball competition, the first rally of 2026 proved to be a great way for students to get excited about upcoming events. With the new semester starting and break coming to an end, many students have been feeling disappointed and unmotivated to come back to school. The purpose of this rally was to bring spirit back into the new year and get people excited about the new semester – given that most people want to continue sleeping in.
The rally began with a video by the rally leaders depicting Senior Luke McLeod auditioning for the role of Troy in High School Musical. After completing roll call, McLeod and Senior Kaelyn Abeyta performed a rendition of “Breaking Free” from the famous musical movie.
The main events that occurred at the rally were the competitions between the boys and girls winter sports. The boys and girls soccer teams participated in wheelie competitions where one person was sitting on a wheelie and the other person was using a pool noodle to pull them across the gym. The goal was to get across the gym the fastest to win. Freshman Varsity soccer player Ava Sytz said, “Playing in the wheelie competitions against the boys with my team was really fun because it was exciting and something different than we’ve done before.”
Other sports competitions included a race between boys and girls Cross Country where each person had to walk across the gym floor wearing high heels while holding a spoon with a ping pong ball on it in their mouth. Boys and girls golf also competed to see who could knock down the most cones with a golf club the fastest, with the loser having to take a sip of a smoothie full of condiments like ketchup and mustard.
The rally also consisted of an epic bubble ball fight between Seniors Caleb Blete and Henry Goodman and an inaugural T-shirt cannon. Designed by students in AP Physics C, the t-shirt launching contraptions gave students a sense of competition as they attempted to grab the shirts that launched their way. T-Shirt launcher builder, senior Lucas Katz explained how the idea for it came up. “For my Physics C class, we were assigned to build a T-Shirt launcher using elasticity. My partner and I got to use ours during the rally to hand out T-shirts to people in a fun way, and luckily it worked and the shirts launched super far.”
With all of these fun activities came lots of planning and preparing for the rally. Senior and rally leader Lily Coane explained what went into planning the rally as a leadership student. “The first thing we did was make the scripts for the video before we start filming it. Then we start writing the scripts for the actual rally and plan all of the fun activities. We then do a rehearsal for the rally with the whole leadership team a few days before the actual rally.”
Overall, the winter rally was a huge success because of all the effort put into the planning and the competitions by students, resulting in an entertaining rally that brought students excitement about being back at school.
