As the football season draws to a close, so does Mitty’s Pepband, a combined group of Wind Ensemble and Concert Band members under the direction of Mr. Mason Kimont. Each year, the band works hard practicing and performing for their fellow Monarchs and audience members during the half-time shows of Mitty’s football games. At the final game of this year, Pepband celebrated its Senior Night.

Emma Lee, a current junior, along with Sean Kang, also a junior, were the major contributors to making Senior Night happen. Emma mentioned that she “began thinking about Senior Night and discussing it with friends three weeks before the game itself.”  She put together a list of all of the seniors and then asked underclassmen to sign up to make posters for each of them via Google Sheets. Working alongside Sean, they also sent out a Google Form to the seniors asking for their favorite snacks to personalize unique gift bags for each of them. Over the next few weeks leading up to the game, Emma, Sean, and many students who signed up to help worked outside of their school hours to create the posters and gifts. On the night of the game, the band gave the posters to members of the Royals, who held the posters and cheered for the seniors during Pepband’s half-time show. After the show, Mr. Kimont distributed additional bouquets to make the event even more special. 

To explore the perspectives of the seniors and their experiences, Supash Bhat, a current senior and one of the lead drum majors, stated that he was “expecting there to not be much happening,” but as he got out onto the field, he recalled memories from his previous years and started to anticipate his own Senior Night. As the game was nearing the end of half-time, he started seeing the posters being handed out to the Royals and reflected on how exciting the whole event was—especially since he got more Oreos. Another senior who recalled his memory of this event was Hugo Lee. He stated, “People often say that the last night of everything is supposed to be sad; I wasn’t sad.”