“What time is it? Titan Time!”. Yes, you heard that right if you were still one of the 20 people left in D-Block. The parents took over chanting duties from Dominion’s student section in the 3rd and 4th quarter of Dominion’s Varsity Football game vs Heritage last Friday night. As a result, Titan parents started chanting the name of the students study hall period, “Titan Time”.

That’s what our school spirit has came down to now. Parents, who do not even attend our school, chanting the name Dominion student’s study hall. D-Block is irrelevant now, and has been for the past couple seasons.

If you show up halfway through the first quarter of Titan football game you would think to yourself, “This school has really good spirit. The stands are full, the kids are cheering, everyone’s loud, and everyone has cool spirit wear.” It’s great. There is one problem though. Kids do not come to these games to actually watch the football or show everyone their school spirit. Kids get bored around the middle of the second quarter (no matter the score), and get up and leave.

Friday night’s game sold 802 tickets for the game, and that does not include the 323 year around sporting event passes issued out at the beginning of the year. 1,125 people could be at a Titan football game at one time. Obviously not all people with year round passes attended, but the number could definitely be upwards of 1,000 people. By the end of the 4th quarter there were only 20 people in our student section cheering on our Titans as they headed into overtime.

Last Friday night Dominion won in a thrilling contest where they prevailed on a goal line stop in overtime to win 21-14. It was a super exciting game from the start as Dominion jumped out to a 14-0 lead, but then surrendered it in the 4th quarter. At the end of the second quarter, as Dominion was up 14-0, nearly 75% of Dominion’s student section was gone. Then nearly 95% of all the students that were here were gone by the end of the 3rd quarter. Heritage’s student section at the end of overtime had more students left in their student section then in ours.

Dominion’s Student Council Association have done an extremely poor job making football games engaging and making students want to stay in D-Block for a lot of the game. All SCA does is tell people what the spirit week is, but does not do anything to make sure it happens or make sure people actually attend the games. They have a very poor presence at football games, and do not do a good job at making sure that people actually are cheering and having a good time. The President of SCA, Zach Davis, and the Vice President, Gina Wilson, along with other members in SCA all attend the football games, but by halftime almost all of the members of SCA were gone. Once over time began there were literally 20 kids still standing in D-Block. 1 of the 20 kids remaining was Anna Gill, SCA’s Secretary. If SCA cares at all about our student section or about our school spirit, then they would stay for majority of the games, and keep leading chants.

The main reason that people attend football games are to pose for pictures in their spirit wear for Instagram or Snapchat. I know that I am victim to this one myself. If you open up Instagram after a Friday night football game you will see over hundreds of photos of people with their friends not even watching the game. Kids just want the photos of them showing their school “spirit” by taking a few pictures, posting, then leaving. At any given time there is at least one group of friends in the stands posing for pictures. Both guys and girls will stand with their backs to the games for maybe upwards of 5-10 minutes in order to take the right picture with the right friend combination.

If our student section wants to actually have a purpose besides pictures, then SCA needs to actually attend school events. What happened Friday night can never happen again, but it will keep happening if the leaders of our school spirit do not actually put in an effort to keep it alive.