Every school year has brought  the same dilemma for my class: Will we have a hoodie? The answer to that, I cannot tell you. However, I can complain about the trials and tribulations that need to be taken into account when pushing a class hoodie from design to purchasable merchandise while serving as a class officer.

It began freshman year, when I came to the unfortunate realization that it is impossible to please 300 classmates. Sprung on to design a class Homecoming T-shirt in less than a few hours by assistant principal Matt Torrens, I scraped together a sub-par design that I still hear complaints about to this day.

I was pestered with the never-ending … “Ally, why did it have to be forest green, why couldn’t it have been a darker shade?” Girl, I don’t know, ask Custom Ink why they have zero options: I’m balling on a budget. 

Tainted by that experience, I was determined to make everyone miserable and not have a class hoodie. Then sophomore year came around, and we had online school: I used the classic “unprecedented times” as an excuse for not doing one. During our junior year, I was too busy racking up prom funds from Ten Ren boba fundraisers to give it a thought.

Class hoodies seem great in theory, but designs are overwhelmingly hard to get approved. I was shocked to open the Google form design contest to a striking 12 options. With 126 responses from seniors stating they would purchase one of the hoodies, class officers noticed teams of people banding together to advocate for a specific design.

What was supposed to be a successful season of class hoodies for our final year of high school turned into full-on war. If I can’t make everybody happy, I might as well make no one happy, right? Just kidding! But seriously, it is hard to please a massive group. If senior class officers are to move forward with the class hoodie contest, seniors must accept that the majority vote is the ultimate design. The bottom line: Your senior class officers cannot accommodate everyone’s differing opinions.