Gallery • 8 Photos

Andrew Hoang

Winning the gold - Senior Grant Shoults celebrates his "win" when senior Hailey Kurlfink said yes to his Homecoming ask during the fall sports rally.

The Olympics is a way for countries to come together in athletics and engage each other in competition that everyone can be a part of, whether it be participating or spectating.

On Friday, Sept. 11 at the fall sports rally, ASB announced “Olympics” as the 2015 Homecoming theme. The announcement involved senior Grant Shoults, who broke a junior world record in the 4×200 free relay and won two golds and one silver for Team USA at this year’s FINA Junior World Championships.

In support of the announcement, students decked out in red, white and blue for the USA-themed varsity football game against Trabuco Hills that night.

“We only keep moving forward, and I think that’s why the Olympics is such a great theme,” said senior Morgan Delaney, ASB spirit commissioner. “It’s gone on for centuries and yet its purpose reigns true today: to win. We must be unified. And to be unified, we must be different because it is in the different aspects of the community that we find the best version of ourselves, from the athlete to the scholar to the fan to the teacher.”

Getting all the members of ASB to decide on one theme for Homecoming is no easy feat. It was at the ASB camp in June that the idea of “Olympics” came up. After overwhelming approval at the camp, ASB reinforced the idea at meetings once school started and eventually reached a total agreement.

“The theme is not centered around Grant Shoults,” said junior Justin Wittekind, ASB vice president. “It was just coincidental. [We chose] the Olympics because it not only represents athletic competition, which we all know SM is excellent at, but more than that the Olympics theme represents a sort of unity and peace and togetherness that is definitely at the heart of our school’s mission, Caritas Christi.”

Beyond sports, the diversity at SMCHS allows us to be exposed to other cultures and to develop respect for people of other countries, just like the participants and spectators of the Olympics do during competition.

“In the world today, we are very separate,” said senior Peyton Ziemer, ASB media commissioner. “Think about it. You switch classes everyday but how well do you really know the people in [each] class. You know their names, but you may not know their story. I feel sometimes we get so caught up in our own lives and in our own friend group and the Olympics really helps us to remember the importance of branching out and meeting new people with all of the diversity out there.”

The slogan for the Olympics, “Faster, Higher, Stronger,” embodies the motto that you can always push yourself to new lengths and the word “can’t” is not an option if you want to succeed.

“Our whole lives will, at some point, be a constructive competition between our coworkers or our fellow college classmates, and in the end it will always be who is going to reach the finish line first,” Delaney said. “But the really cool thing that SMCHS teaches us by the time we leave is the fact that there is no finish line. We only keep moving forward, and I think that’s why the Olympics is such a great theme.”

The Olympics applies to our everyday lives at SMCHS and this is the underlying reason ASB picked “Olympics” to be the Homecoming theme. Even though we may not always win the gold medal, as long as we try our best, we are representing the Eagles with pride, just as the athletes in the Olympics represent their country with pride.