I really love the high school Class of 2018. With their cheers and chant of “fourth place, fourth place” when the announcement was made Friday night at the Pioneer game as to who won the best homecoming float, they showed that winning is subjective to how one looks at it.
To understand this, we must first look back to the history of the homecoming float contest. It’s no secret that generally the senior class will be awarded with the honor most years, whether or not they have the best float. The contest has been a hotbed of controversy for years as it is a highly competitive contest. This year, however, both the senior and junior classes decided to do something a little different, something that was honestly outside the box.
Instead of investing large amounts of money to a float, the juniors wanted to raise money for the food bank to help feed the underserved of our community. The seniors wanted to raise money to benefit Baylor Bramble, the Siegel player who was critically injured two years ago in a game here and who continues to recover from his medical problems.
At the end of the day, they did just that with the juniors getting over 2,000 cans of food for the food bank and the seniors raising over $3,000 for the Bramble family which was presented during halftime festivities at Nunley Stadium.
It turns out that tradition did not hold this year as the seniors took fourth place with their Superman float. The juniors were runners-up with their soup can float. The sophomores won with their "Star Wars" float, which, I have to admit, was the clear winner. It had it all.
It had "Star Wars" characters and, something that’s rare on a float, it had open flames. If you didn’t’ get to see it, you missed something rare. Real fire was shooting from the back of the X-wing fighter. I mean, there’s some bad things that can happen with open flames on a float so you have to give it to the sophomores for guts and presentation.
While the Class of 2018 didn’t bring home the title of best float, they did something that will be much more enduring. There’s a lot of dispersions thrown on the millennials by older folks. They worry they aren’t community service oriented like the earlier generations.
I say Homecoming 2017 proves that all wrong. I think millennials do have a sense of public service, they just don’t want to sit down and have dinner at your civic club meeting with you on Monday night after doing charity work over the weekend. They march to the beat of a different drummer, the cadence of which some of us folks that have receding hairlines can’t hear.
The Class of 2018, and the Class of 2019 for that matter, actually accomplished something that many people work a lifetime for but never earn – respect.
Standard reporter Duane Sherrill can be reached at 473-2191.