All year, students unite together to support one another in both academic and athletic competitions. However, for one week, the Upper School student body competes against each other and is divided into two teams: Blue and Gold.
Reintroduced by this year’s Student Council president, Alex Soliz, and SuperFanMen Alex Barrett, Mitchell Galadrdi and C.J. Ness, Blue and Gold week returned to campus this spring to bring a fun week
of activities to help alleviate the stress of the upcoming final exam season. As the class of 2024’s time on campus comes to an end, they wanted to create one last competition between the Upper School students.
Blue team captain and SuperFanMan Mitchell Galardi recalls his freshman year blue and gold week, particularly the memories that stemmed from it.
“I remember our freshman year blue and gold week back when it was the COVID year, and there weren’t a lot of fun St. Mark’s student body events,” Galardi said. I remember being in the group m and sending memes and feeling great because seniors who I didn’t know liked my messages. It was just awesome to have that experience, and we knew we needed to have it for our senior year, too.”
This year, the campus returned to normal, so Soliz and the SuperFanMen wanted to incorporate more indoor activities into the week, including sports like dodgeball and potentially basketball.
“We really wanted a pep rally for this because there weren’t many Friday night games to really have one,” Galardi said. “Lacrosse had one Friday night game, which was unlucky. We found the week that we have it, and it was kind of our best option because we were going to have a baseball game on Friday that would have the blue and gold week lead into it, and there wouldn’t be other teams gone for track meets or tournaments.”
In order to run a successful week this year, the SuperFanMen and Soliz began planning the event months in advance. Time had to be allotted for changes to the schedule in case Mr. Leneau or Mr. Ashton deemed an event unsatisfactory.
“We had a couple of meetings talking with Mr. Ashton, getting things approved ahead of time. So we had to come up with all the events that we wanted. A lot of it was borrowed from the Blue and Gold week of our freshman year, like the football game that we hopefully will have at the end of the week. It was fun for our freshmen year, and we want to keep it, but many things are new.”
Sophomore Aryaman Lahoti played dodgeball on Friday and found Blue and Gold Week enjoyable.
“It was a lot of fun,” said Lahoti. “I was first contacted by our class StuCo members an hour before the event started. They made sure every participant felt good. It felt great when the crowd was cheering me on, and it was great school spirit in general.”
