Having established themselves last year as enthusiastic sports fanatics, the Superfans have a vision for the school.
“We want 500 people to fill up Schluntz Gymnasium every Friday night for basketball,” said Zak, one of the co-founders of the Superfans. “That’s my long term goal.”
The club focuses on the sports which fans gravitate to the most, which are typically sports like football and basketball, but it also tries to get fans to watch other sports teams like volleyball and hockey, according to Zak. One of the goals of the Superfans is to expand the club from highlighting the more popular sports to all sports and even to the arts.
“I would go to a play and there would be 20 people in the audience,” social studies teacher Michael Normant, who is also the adviser of the club, said. “I went to a Jazz Band concert, and the audience was so small it could fit on the stage. I would love to be ambitious and say, ‘Why can’t you have Superfans for productions and for music?’”
Normant said that the club isn’t just a way of getting more fans for the events. He wants the club to be a culture changer.
“For me, the bigger picture is supporting your classmates and supporting your peers no matter what they are working hard to accomplish,” Normant said. “We aren’t just about athletics. We are about everything in this school and generating enthusiasm in this community.”
Zak has similar goals for the club.
“It’s about changing the culture, not about one event,” Zak said.
The lack of school spirit in previous years has inspired the club to organize multiple events.
“We’re hoping to have some additional pep rallies this year,” Normant said. “We’ve got the shirts that are around, we’re trying to organize a pep band this year, and we’re continuing to work on the slow process of getting a new logo for the school.”
According to Normant and Zak, part of changing the culture involves the idea that everyone at the school should be a Superfan. This caused Normant to change the name of the club to the Brookline Superfan Organizing Committee.
“If you talk about Superfans as a club, our club should technically include everyone in the school,” Normant said. “What we do in the meetings is to try to plan things to get people to have more school spirit.”
Normant and Zak agree that everyone at the school should be involved and spirited, whether they are faculty or student. According to Normant, even the new headmaster Deborah Holman, is a supporter of the club.
“The good thing about the new headmaster, Ms. Holman, is that she really loves the idea,” Normant said. “She has been to a few football games so far. It says a lot about her support for the school and the culture. At the game versus Braintree, she went into the student section and tried to get them fired up. She is really supportive and into the idea of having a raised level of school spirit.”
Normant thinks that the Superfans have been very successful so far.
“In just the two years it has existed, I would say that the group has made a tangible difference. Just the fact that I hear more people talk about games and we see the shirts around,” he said.
Some students, however, aren’t as optimistic as Normant.
“I feel like our school has such a lack of school spirit that the Superfans have the work set out for them,” junior Henry Shreffler said. “It’s ingrained in our culture. I don’t feel like we will ever get the same amount of school spirit as the schools around. It’s a characteristic of BHS.”
Normant acknowledges that it’s possible that the Superfans will fail to create a new culture. However, he thinks that the students want the new, more spirited culture, but they just haven’t been exposed to it yet.
“In the end, if the culture isn’t sticking, I will just have to say, ‘Oh well, that’s not the culture,’” Normant said. “I don’t think that’s the case. I think that this culture just needs to be brought into the light.”
