Be True to Your School

My high school experience felt quite normal to me, but in the years since my graduation, I have learned that this is not so. I went to an all-girls school, for one, and wore a uniform about which I have mixed feelings even to this day, for six years. My school was also very small, so any sporting event was reason enough to get all the students (all five hundred of us) on the bleachers in the gym to support each and every team. Volleyball, floor hockey, basketball, handball - you name it. If there was a game on, we were trouped into the gym, handed noisemakers and cheerleading pompoms, and encouraged to scream ourselves hoarse. This was quite different to our normal way of life. If, in class, the volume rose too high, our teachers were wont to look ferociously down their noses at us and utter a single word: “Ladies…” This shut us up every time. So imagine our delight at not only being allowed to be loud, but down right spurred to do so! I didn’t always follow the games especially well, not knowing the rules of most sports, but it wasn’t hard to holler along when everyone else did, and chat with my friends in between screaming sessions.
Perhaps the best part about all this school spirit was our mascot. Our school teams were the Flames, and an image of a lighted torch always accompanied our high school’s motto and name. It’s not a bad team name, as sports teams go, and you could do worse than a torch as a school logo. Someone had obviously gone to a lot of trouble to make a torch mascot costume, worn by an enthusiastic girl in the grade below mine, and she did her mightiest to work us all into the appropriate frenzy - dressed, as best as I could tell, as a bright orange onion. The torch costume was not convincing, and I have to assume that competing teams were bewildered and perplexed by a school that stamped and bellowed when bidden to do so by a human-sized polyester allium bulb.
Now, of course, we had chants, and charming little songs, and made all the noise we could muster with the school-sanctioned hand clappers, tambourines, and even kazoos (an ear-splitting experience we only did once). Our school did not have cheerleaders (too small, and only girls), so when faced with school events, the received wisdom seemed to be that if no one was a cheerleader, then we all were. My mother has often remarked that a church with a good choir will often have a congregation who slacks when it comes to singing hymns, and the same maxim appears to be true of high school sports events. If you have no cheerleaders to lead chants and bounce around energetically, then the ‘congregation’, as it were, must take on the mantle and do it themselves. So it was: I routinely shook a tambourine and howled for sports I didn’t understand, adding my voice to the din when our side got a foul, whatever that was, or scored a goal - or was it a try? I didn’t know, and I cared less.
Mob mentality gets a bad rap, probably rightly. But there was something thrilling and exciting about leaping up with my friends and all four hundred and ninety or so other girls when the basketball team won their provincial tournament, shrieking and jumping up and down so enthusiastically that the bleachers shook. I did not know the first thing about three-pointers or travelling, but I did know that the girls on the court were ecstatic at their success, and it was intoxicating to join them in their joy. Besides, there is nothing quite like seeing a schoolmate - sobbing with elation (her sister was on the team), running up and down the length of the bleachers, inciting greater and greater throes of wild celebration - dressed like an onion.

Jennifer