This week marks the first Winter Week of Seminole High School. Organized by Seminole’s very own Leadership club, the week’s purpose is to raise awareness of other sports besides football and to support them as we do the popular fall sport.

Leadership sponsor Janill Johnsen says, “School spirit and moral is typically pretty low after football season. We’ve toyed around with Winter Week before, but this is the first year we’ve actually implemented it.”

The pep rally at the end of the week is for the Boys Freshman, JV and Varsity Basketball game this Friday vs. Lake Mary, otherwise known as one of Seminole’s biggest rivals. The reason why basketball was featured in this pep rally as opposed to a different sport is that it has a  high popularity, much like football.

The themes for the days of this week are Flannels Friends and Flicks, Sweater Weather Wednesday, Snowed In (Pajama Day), and orange and black on game day to support the boys as they go against the Lake Mary Rams.

Sophomore Zubair Niloy says, “This pep rally is gonna be great. Lake Mary is our biggest rival, so [the games are] sure to have a huge turnout and everybody will be excited from the pep rally [beforehand].”

Unlike the events of homecoming week, Leadership made sure that the themes for this week were much easier to dress up for, not requiring extravagant costumes that one might not find lying around in their closet. While some may argue that the whole appeal of dressing up is to show off their creativity and see what others come up with, Leadership believes that making this week’s events more convenient to dress up for will increase participation.

“There are a lot of pros and cons [in] making the days more accessible. I think the real reason why people wouldn’t dress up is because school spirit is so low,” says Johnsen.

Another factor that may contribute to a small percentage of Seminole’s student body participating is that Winter Week is brand new. The idea was only just formed in December last year, which gave the week less than a month to be developed.

Johnsen also states that events at Seminole typically take a while to become popular, as it took those like the dodgeball tournament a few years to become as well attended as it is today.

Winter Week is a new event to help raise student and staff morale following the football season. This is an event that Leadership hopes to continue for years to come, and to grow in popularity as well.