Rally Commission aims to inspire more active engagement

Freshman Class President Sina Mohtaj-Khorassani helps set up for the night rally.

Among the issues to improve are diversifying games and fixing technical bugs.

Seeking jumpstart rally attendance and engagement, the Rally Commission is aiming to increase the hype factor and improve the overall experience through improved audio and new games.

“We are trying to improve our games by making up new games while also keeping the classic[s],” head commissioner Angie Chen said.

The commission includes senior Ryder Gangemi, juniors Angie Chen, Dylan Wilson, Annaliese Shab, and sophomore Rian Khetani. Thus far, there have been two tutorial rallies and one night rally, with improvements occurring each time. There are still two more to come, with the upcoming one on Feb. 16 opening voluntary sign-ups for rally games on their Instagram bio.

In addition, one of the games that the commission plans to play is pop-the-balloon, a classic game that involves two people trying to pop balloons with different parts of their bodies. They also want to do more food-related rally games such as pie-eating and donut-eating competitions.

Chen said that rally turnout has been great during tutorials, but it needed to be improved for the only night rally of the year. However, about a dozen visitors from Lynbrook High School and Los Gatos High School helped develop strategies to foster class spirit during the rally.

Lynbrook sophomore Samay Sikri helped encourage sophomore class spirit by starting chants like “we can’t hear you,” directed at other classes. In addition, class offices also ordered inflatable noisemakers for people to excite each class representative during rally games.

Another issue is that the speaker system set up in the gym makes it extremely hard to hear any emcees’ dialogues. Fixes are needed with the speaker system, and she hopes it will be solved as soon as possible to have the optimal rally experience.

“Our long-term goals are to try and get the students to have an academic break, have fun, and come together as a whole school,” Chen said.