Spirit Night invited students to paint the finishing touches on their class eagles in preparation for next week’s Homecoming festivities. The event took place today from 3 to 7 p.m. in front of Manzanita.

Spirit Club provided pizza, candy and drinks at the event and played music over the loudspeaker.

“Everybody came together, and people were happy and having a great time and challenging the other grades,” Director of Upper School Clubs Eric Kallbrier said. “It was just really fulfilling to see everybody come together and do so much work.”

This year’s theme, “Past and Future,” allowed each class to take a different creative direction with its eagle. The freshmen and seniors reminisced about the past, with the freshmen choosing a nostalgic childhood theme and the seniors opting for a psychedelic 1960s theme. On the other hand, the sophomores looked towards the future, the sophomores with a sci-fi theme and the juniors with a graduation theme.

Ruya Ozveren (9) described the freshman eagle as not only a manifestation of the past but also of the class’ feelings about the next four years of high school.

“There’s an eagle with a clear sky and a rainbow, showing our hope for the future to have a clear sky, to have it lit up with beautiful colors,” she said. “Around the box is just a bunch of TV shows and characters that we fell in love with as [children].”

The sophomore eagle featured silver metallic mechanistic detailing, painted painstakingly over the course of the week. Sophomore class dean Kelly Horan thought that the sophomores’ early preparation paid off.

“They’re much more organized [this year],” she said. “They were always creative; we had a great eagle last year, but they did it all that Friday night. And now they’re pretty much done. They’re just adding finishing touches, and they’re amazing.”

The junior eagle, themed “Graduation,” featured a red, orange and yellow-colored eagle to represent the first line of Harker’s theme song, “Flame of knowledge lights our way.” Around the base, the juniors painted scenes of graduation caps and sunsets over Disneyland, a reference to the senior trip to Laguna Beach.

The seniors took a much more roundabout route to reach their final design, painting and repainting over the course of the week.

“It looked so bad in the beginning, and a bunch of sophomores dissed it,” Kaitlyn Nguyen (12) said. “I was like, ‘We’ve got to go big or go home,’ so I just went ham on the details of everything. I wanted it to be psychedelic, so I used a bit of optical illusions just to mess with you, and then I put a lot of detail into the legs.”

Melissa Kwan
Senior class spirit coordinator Dolan Dworak thought that Spirit Night brought the senior class closer together.

“We really [want to] make senior year as close to the ideal high school experience as you would imagine it to be,” he said. “Like in pop culture, you always have these representations of what high school is supposed to be like, and it’d be nice if we could try collectively to make that a vague reality.”

Next week’s Homecoming festivities include dress-up days for each class, a spirit rally and a scream-off. The dance takes place next Friday, and the football game takes place next Saturday against Rio Vista High School.