Blues, reds, greens and yellows cover the school as students get ready for Battle of the Classes. With BOTC happening this Friday, March 21, some may wonder about what it takes to produce the final event. As the leadership class leads their grades through practices and meetings, students and staff shared insight on what goes on behind the scenes.
BOTC season begins in late January with each grade’s class meeting, where students can learn about what BOTC is and how they can get involved. All of the games are introduced and briefly explained, allowing students to anticipate what they would like to join. The games include Human Pyramid, Human Horseshoe, Crab Soccer, Skin the Snake, Alphabet Soup, Tug of War, Hula Hoop Relay and Human Table. This year, two new games were introduced: Mattress Race and Platform.
Games, Five Minutes of Fame, the class flag, hallways and spirit week participation all partially make up how many points each class can earn for their final BOTC score. The class that earns the most points will receive first place, with fourth place earning the least amount of points. At the end of the BOTC event, the winner class is revealed.
Each member on council has a role to play during the BOTC season, commonly working together to lead and encourage students to come to practices. Senior class publicist Maliyah Vargas shared her role in ensuring BOTC runs smoothly for seniors.
“As a publicist, my job is basically making the flyers that go out every Sunday. I have to write out the schedule and make sure that people are going to the practices,” Vargas said. “Also, part of that is the games that I’m running, I have to make group chats and tell people, ‘Hey guys, we have practice this day.’”
Freshman outreach coordinator Vanessa Dinh explained how it had been difficult for the freshman council to learn about the games and gain participation, but with help from upperclassmen, the freshman have learned how to better prepare for their first BOTC.
“It’s new for us. We’ve currently been getting a lot of help from the seniors, and we were just learning all the games and how to do them, and also strategizing,” Dinh said. “The seniors are really helping us and helping us get into how to do things and also how to get participation and making sure that everyone in our class knows what’s going on with BOTC and how big of an event and commitment it is.”
Vargas enjoys helping out the seniors’ sister class when it comes to shared practices. She reflected on her experience of being a freshman who admired the upperclassmen.
“I’ve watched every year. The seniors always win. I remember my freshman year watching the seniors, and I looked up to them so much,” Vargas said. “Every time we’re in the gym practicing, I keep finding myself walking over to them (the freshmen) and wanting to teach them and help them because I think it’s so much fun being led by the older people. I remember appreciating that a lot when I was a freshman.”
Physical education teacher Pedro Martinez is the freshman class advisor and was a BOTC judge last year. After being asked to supervise practices, Martinez took advantage of the opportunity to be more involved with school events, but he has noticed a difference between the seniors and freshmen during their practices.
“When you see the seniors – because they’ve done it for a long time – you know that they know what they’re doing and who’s gonna do what event,” Martinez said. “The freshmen are pretty much still trying to figure it out. They’re new to this, and there’s gonna be a lot of trial and error and a lot of disorganization.”
In addition to the BOTC games, Five Minutes of Fame, the class dance, also takes planning. Being in charge of leading Five Minutes of Fame, Dinh and others in leadership with prior dance experience choreographed the dances for their class before teaching it to others.
The leadership class dedicates an entire class period for each council to choose music for their 5 Minutes of Fame dances. Dinh explained that students on the dance, cheer and color guard team will often get involved in choreography.
“We just go through Spotify, TikTok, look for what’s good and trending right now. For dances, we’d probably look at old BOTC dances – how are they organized? Are they really advanced, or are they more like everyone can learn?” Dinh said.
Another large aspect of BOTC is the hallway decorations, where each class is assigned a hallway to decorate with their class colors. Classes can earn many points with a well-decorated hallway, but the process begins earlier, brainstorming a theme. Council members will often look to past decorations for inspiration.
Junior class secretary Audrey Bartolome, who is in charge of hallway decor for the juniors, emphasized that participation and engagement is necessary to bring decorative hallway ideas to life.
“It’s sometimes a little bit difficult to fully grasp the length of the hallway and every single aspect that needs to be decorated. I think looking back at being a freshman and doing BOTC hallways and homecoming hallways, you can obviously see that one isn’t fully experienced,” Bartolome said.
Bartolome planned to stick to a simple theme so painters and designers are not overworked during the short time period. Previously, council members had stuck to cartoonish designs rather than realistic styles.
“It’s better to stray from complex characters. For example, if you were to do a live-action movie, that would be a lot more complex compared to a cartoon. Last year we did ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ which is a very old and very simple cartoon,” Bartolome said. “This year we’re doing Mario, which is also just a very simple video game.”
Many students and staff look forward to BOTC, where all the classes can come together and compete against each other, but it takes months of planning and effort. Every year, many feel the leadership class works hard to create an enjoyable and lively BOTC for students and staff to enjoy.
“It’s not just something that someone can do in a week. It’s something that takes time. This applies to the BOTC flag, the BOTC spirit days, BOTC games,” Bartolome said. “Everything needs build up. Everything needs momentum. Everything needs participation.”