Eagles of many generations were decked out in blue and gold at East Meck’s 67th homecoming. Before the game had even begun, the student section quickly filled with eager, spirited students.

On the night of Oct. 6, the Eagles battled the Garinger Wildcats for the 2017 homecoming game. The last time the Wildcats played the Eagles, the Eagles won 70-6. Again this time, the Eagles soared past the Wildcats with a 44-0 win.

At halftime, ROTC cadets formed the Saber Squad and held up swords to the sky. The cadets led the way for the homecoming court to walk along the red carpet with their escorts. The freshman princess was Emina Lockley, the sophomore princess was Shelby Perry and the junior princess was Juanita Valencia. The 2016 Homecoming Queen, Nia Goodman, crowned the new queen, Aiyana Willoughby. The first runner-up was Yennifer Flores.

In the week leading up to homecoming, students were encouraged to dress up each day to show spirit. During spirit week, the themes were denim day on Monday, tacky Tuesday, duo/trio day on Wednesday, throwback Thursday and Friday, the day of the homecoming game, was “Beast Meck” (East Meck Spirit Day).

“[Homecoming] is an all hands on deck operation, we’ve been working since school has started to get everything ready,” said junior and student congress member Alex Donatelli. “There’s the pep rally, the tailgate. A lot more goes into the night of than [people] might think.”

On Friday afternoon, congress hosted a pep rally in the football stadium to get the student body excited for homecoming. The pep rally involved races and activities like apple bobbing and pie-eating contests between varsity sports captains and dancing cheerleaders. Unfortunately, there was a shortage of time which didn’t allow for all activities to be completed.

“Behind the scenes it was super stressful for that whole week,” Willoughby, who is also student body president, said. “I almost broke down in tears because it was really stressful just having all of that pressure–people already talk about congress, ‘congress isn’t fun, we don’t do fun things’ [but] we try really hard to make [events] inclusive to everyone, like the pep rally.

“We spent copious amounts of time going over like, if we do it in the stands, will people feel more involved?” she said. “We wanted to make sure people were involved and we take a lot of feelings into account of everything that we do.”

For the enjoyment of all Eagles, student congress planned a football tailgate that had games, face painting, a tent for alumni, music and food prepared by culinary and FCCLA students.

The game started after the East Meck Marching Band played the National Anthem.

In the first quarter, while the scoreboard read 1:31, Khalil Woods went 81 yards for a touchdown, scoring six points for the Eagles.

Khalil Gilliam upheld Woods’ standards with a 52-yard touchdown pass to Nu-Kwan Fair during the second quarter.

At the end of the game, the Eagles had 397 rushing yards and 149 passing yards.

This win brought East Meck’s overall standing to 5-4 and conference record to 2-1.