Reflections on Spirit Week at Lyndon Institute

By David Stahler Jr.

Two thumps of a bass drum. The resounding clap of over 400 pairs hands coming together with a deep woof of the Scandinavian cheer. “Skol!” 

It starts off slow in Alumni Auditorium. Two beats and a clap. Pause. Then faster. Faster. Faster until the room is a thunder of overlapping clapping, drumming, and cheering from a sea of maroon and white, the energy crackling enough to make the hair stand on end, the spine shiver. 

“Give me an L!” Chad Simpson cries from the stage. 

“L!” the crowd screams back.

He takes us through the rest of the letters—Y! N! D! O! N! Then the all-important word. 

“What’ve we got?”

“Lyndon!”

“I can’t hear you!”

“LYNDON!!”

It’s Spirit Week, the week before the “Big Game” between LI and St. Johnsbury Academy, and Simpson (class of 2000) is—as he says into the mic during assembly early in the week—”juiced!” He’s always juiced this time of year, always has been in all the years he’s worked at LI. Teacher, coach, admissions officer. He’s a living mascot, a Viking booster, a big man with big energy. I watch him and remember when he was a student in my English Literature class, remember when he was up on stage back then during Spirit Week, not as a coach but as a player. Even then he was a big guy with the same intensity, humor, and passion. Now his son is in the crowd along with my daughter, both in the junior class, both Vikings together.

This year marks my thirty-first Spirit Week at LI—four as a student, twenty-seven as a teacher. The “Viking Skol'' chant is a recent addition. Perhaps the most important time of the year for my school, Spirit Week is a dynamic spectacle, not only in its intensity but in its ever-changing nature. New traditions, new layers, an experience that has evolved over the years to become something that makes LI if not unique then certainly rare among high schools in the best possible way.

My memories of Spirit Week as a student in the late ‘80s are vague and dim. I remember playing alto sax in the pep band freshman year in 1986—riding on a flatbed trailer with the rest of the band Friday night before the game among a procession of floats. There was a bonfire, cheering. I remember having to play the next day at halftime on the field in St. J, marching in six inches of broken ice and snow, my feet numb, my fingers so frozen I couldn’t feel the keys on my saxophone to know what I was playing. Beyond that, nothing much else comes to mind. I wasn’t on the football team; I honestly didn’t care much about our rivalry with the Academy. I loved LI for other reasons—its beautiful old buildings, its caring teachers, my friends on the Nordic team, jazz band with John Padden.

You see, everyone loves Lyndon Institute in their own way. And people—so many people—love this school, this small, plucky independent school in the heart of northeastern Vermont, love it in ways and to lengths that never cease to amaze me. 

“It’s weird that I don’t remember much about Spirit Week from when I was a student here,” I said the other day to colleague and fellow alumnus Janet Dunphy-Brown ‘87. Janet was a senior my freshman year.

“I’m not surprised,” she said. “There really wasn’t much beyond the Friday pep rally and a dance the night of the game.” 

Back then, it was all about the game, one of the oldest high school football rivalries in the country, dating back to 1894 and now in its 118th matchup. And while there was buzz and energy—and sometimes pranks between the schools—in the week leading up to the game, Spirit Week was really more like Spirit Day.

I graduated in 1990. When I came back to LI to teach seven years later, I was surprised to see something new. There were after school events, dress-up days, door decorations, numerous assemblies. Most of all, there was now the Clash of the Classes, where the different classes compete throughout the week to earn points, a quantifiable measure of school spirit.

“[Social studies teacher] Cisi Flynn, who was student council advisor at the time, was the person responsible for creating the Clash of the Clashes, which is really how Spirit Week evolved,” Kathy Smith told me. 

Kathy Smith ‘93, social studies teacher and student council advisor. Formerly Kathy Jackson, a freshman my senior year. Chad Simpson may be the guy on stage with the mic during pep assemblies getting the crowd juiced, but Smith is the reason Spirit Week is what it is. A force of nature, mistress of a million details.

It was 1997. I was finally getting a chance to come home after a position in the English department opened up. After college, I’d spent the first three years teaching high school in Mansfield, Massachusetts. Football was a big deal there. Literally next door to Foxboro and just a few miles down the road from where the New England Patriots played, Mansfield was a serious annual contender in the vaunted Hockomock League. But what I now saw at LI seemed so strange, so foreign from what I’d experienced in Massachusetts.

The kids at Lyndon were into this whole “spirit” stuff. Unironically. And not just the football team. Not just the cheerleaders. Not just the pep band. Everyone was into it. And it was fabulous. Somewhere in the mid-90s, between my leaving and my return, something had changed, and it’s been going strong ever since.

For starters, it isn’t just about “The Game” anymore. Yes, the final pep rally assembly on Friday focuses on the football team. The boys still get up on stage and give speeches in between class cheers and numbers from the band. It’s a lot of fun. But throughout the week, it’s not unusual for all the sports to get shoutouts and time in the spotlight in assemblies throughout the week, both boys and girls teams. 

And it's not just the assemblies. It’s the kickball games on the softball field after school, the volleyball matches on Matty Green. Freshman taking on Juniors, Sophomores taking on Seniors, winners versus winners, losers versus losers. But who wins or loses doesn’t really matter—everyone who shows up earns points for their class. There are bragging rights and some light-hearted trash talking, but mostly lots of laughter and fun. 

There’s the food drive, one of the week’s other competitions. Smith’s classroom fills up day by day as students bring in nonperishable items for HOPE, the local food shelf, not just to earn points but to give back to the community. (A recent record was 4606 items; Smith says we’re on track to break that this year.) The food drive is also important for another reason—100 items earns each class its mechanical pig for the pig race in Tuesday’s assembly, one of my favorite events. Every year is a surprise. Which class has figured out how to tweak its pig to go the fastest? Some pigs race across the stage to a flurry of cheers and laughter, others barely cross the starting line, drawing even more laughs.

Each class musters its forces to design giant banners and build floats. Classes compete in chess tournaments at lunch. They gather for a semi-formal homecoming dance on a Wednesday night. They show up on Friday night for the parade and a rally in Bandstand Park and the crowning of the court, followed by a cookout and bonfire back at the school down on Matty Green.

And they dress up. Boy, do they dress up. Each day has a theme. The themes change from year to year. This year, Monday was Barbie World Day (timely and very, very pink); Tuesday was Soccer Mom/BBQ Dad Day; Adam Sandler Day on Wednesday (don’t ask); Thursday was Generations Day (with freshmen as babies, sophomores as middle schoolers, juniors as middle-aged folk, and seniors as, well, senior citizens). The hallways are filled with all kinds of kids dressed up in all kinds of bizarre costumes.

Friday dress up is always the same—maroon and white. And Halloween costumes. The game may have moved a week earlier on the calendar than it used to be, but it hasn’t stopped LI from continuing one of its greatest Spirit Week traditions—Friday’s Halloween Assembly. Each class gets its time in the spotlight, with students coming up on stage, getting interviewed (and sometimes teased) by host Chad Simpson—replacing the venerable Mike Flynn—and judged by a panel of faculty. The freshmen class always has the fewest number of costumed kids. They don’t yet realize that it’s actually cool to dress up in funky (and sometimes very weird) costumes. 

But they learn. They see how the older classes get, well, into the spirit of it all. And as they rise through the ranks of classes, they teach their younger peers what they’ve learned. A virtuous cycle.

And this gets to the heart of what this week is really all about. It’s about a game, yes. But it's really more about celebrating the school, about passing on traditions, about embracing community. It’s about coming together to laugh and cheer and feel connected. We live in a cynical age and teenagers have always been more cynical than most. But for one week, cynicism is put aside, people let their guards down a little, kids get involved, and everyone cheers for their school and for each other.

Another recent addition to Spirit Week tradition has been resurrecting LI’s school song from the ‘30s. Four simple verses—one for each class—and a chorus, based on an old melody used by many high schools and colleges back in the early 20th century. We start practicing at the beginning of the year and by the time Spirit Week rolls around, each class has learned its part. In Friday’s final pep assembly, the song is sung one last time and the voices are genuine and sweet, with all classes, all faculty and staff, coming together at the end to sing the final part that gives me as much of a thrill as the Viking Skol chant: “Lift the chorus, speed it onward, sing her praises high. Hail to thee our alma mater. Hail, all hail, LI!”

I have a lot of wonderful memories of Spirit Week over the last several decades, but there is one that stands out. It’s October 2021. We’ve finally come back to school full-time. Everyone has been through a spring and summer of COVID shutdowns and quarantines, months of separation, isolation. Then a fragmented year of students coming to school part-time with events limited in scope and size, including a much pared-down outdoor Spirit Week in 2020. Now, we’re back everyday. Everyone is learning to be together again. We’re still masked but we’ve decided to move forward with holding our pep assembly in the auditorium once again. 

Even with our masks on the cheering feels especially loud, the music, the applause, the chants even more hair-raising and spine-tingling than ever, both uplifting and cathartic. I realize how much I’ve missed this, how much we all seem to need this. The emotion is raw, palpable, and I can see tears on people’s faces as we remember what it’s like to be gathered again, not only in body but in spirit, being Vikings together.