Friday Nights. One of the most energetic nights across the green fields of America’s high schools, it’s a time when alumni, students, and the community can all unite under one banner for at least one night a week. An atmosphere is present where people are free to cheer and scream out their frustrations of the work week at 22 high schoolers playing a game that the best get paid millions to play, for nothing but their own joy and  school pride.

School pride, however, extends beyond the football team on Friday nights. It’s not just the players who put in many hours of work a week to present the spectacle that can be seen on a 360-by-160-foot field. On the sideline, there are the cheerleaders, whose infectious, positive attitude extends into the crowd to even the most sour of spectators. Then there is the band, a group of students who play music to tantalize the ears of spectators and players alike, and light a fire of excitement in the hearts of all who attend the Friday night spectacle.

The football team spends countless hours practicing and preparing for the battle of wills and brute force that comes to be on a Friday night. Despite what it may look like at times, a football game isn’t just giving some kid a ball and having him run through a bunch of other kids smacking heads.

Football is year-long commitment. In only a matter of weeks after the season ends, the players are back in the weight room three days a week with the end of the last season fresh in their minds. Then the team goes into a spring ball, a pre-preseason practice series at the end of the school year. In the intense heat of early August, the team then meets again for double session practices, consisting of two three-hour practices a day with meals in between.

After eight months of preparation, the season finally comes, and the team practices six days a week. Mondays consist of a scouting report for the upcoming team followed by a practice that ends with an intense conditioning session. Tuesdays are full pads, full-contact practices, and Wednesdays are when the team begins to really crack down on strategies and fine-tune techniques and plays for the upcoming game. By the time Thursdays come, the team can already begin to feel the excitement of a Friday night game creeping in. Finally game day arrives, and an atmosphere of seriousness can be felt in the locker room air as zero hour approaches. When the players run through the banner, they know the results of the week will show.

The cheerleaders are no different from the football team or any other athletic team. They work hard and often to develop the skills and techniques necessary to enthrall the spectators into an atmosphere of excitement in even the biggest of blowouts.

The team may practice two or three times week for anywhere from two to three hours. During these practices they go over every small detail that could affect the quality of their performance, covering techniques such as pyramids, sideline cheers, quarter cheers and free stunts.

“We definitely work a lot harder than people think,” senior cheerleader Jordan Munoz said. “A lot of us always have bruises from throwing people around.”

Like any other team the cheerleaders have traditions that bring the team together, such as locker buddies or the underclassmen decorating the seniors’ bedrooms for senior night.

“It’s a fun sport,” Munoz said. “Not many other sports just let you throw people around and catch them. There is a lot of trust involved and the team is always great, and relationships form.”

The last group of students that make Friday nights memorable put in as much work as any sports team at Southern Lehigh. The marching band is one of the most talented groups of students in the school. Not only do they have to comprehend and play the music, but also they must dance and march in precise complex patterns to create a show that is entertaining for all.

Typically, the process starts in the spring when the band directors meet to decide what kind of show and music they want to play for the upcoming band season, as well as deciding when they want to run band camp, which is like the double session football practices. Band camp is an entire week where the band practices from around nine in the morning to seven or eight at night, with breaks for lunch and dinner. It is very similar to school where the day is split up into several periods and different facets of the show are learned and rehearsed.

“It feels like a million hours [to prepare], but it really isn’t,” percussion instructor Mr. Paul Sabino said. “The kids work hard and we put on a good show because we do a little bit of everything at every time, and they’re always working every single day.”

Band is a co-curricular activity, meaning it is both extracurricular and also a class that meets three times a cycle. The students work for many hours per week, both in and outside of school, in order to make their shows something special.

Marlo Spritzer

After a long week of practicing and rehearsing, the marching band is still not done preparing for their halftime performance. The band will do another runthrough on Friday before the game to fine tune different parts of the field show before finally take its place on the bleachers at the stadium.

“It’s great being able to go to the games and cheer on the team and play the fight song,” said Mr. Sabino, who was a member of the band when he was a student at Southern Lehigh. “That is always something I got out of band when I did it.”

During the game, while everyone else is walking around and talking with friends, the band is dutifully playing pep music, cheering on the team, and providing a rich, warm energy for the crowd. At halftime the band performs their field show, which consistently earns the ranking of superior at band competitions — basically an A+ in the band world.

Friday nights are a result of many different types of students all across the school putting in hundreds of hours of practice. These students strive to do their best in order to make Southern Lehigh Stadium the place to be. The Friday night spectacle is not just about football.  It’s about school spirit, and none of it would happen without the hard work of all the students involved.

Marlo Spritzer