Clubs and Organizations: So Many Choices!
Choosing a club or two from the dozens of options can be challenging. Club leaders used food, candy, props, and games to attract new members.
Wide-eyed freshmen strolled among the tables at the recent organization and club fairs taking in the wide variety of displays, especially the ones offering treats as bait. The Noodle Club distributed noodles; the Cheese Club was giving away (you guessed it) cheese; many of the other groups relied on candy; and for those who preferred a warm beverage, there was tea from the Tea Club. As a leader in both Thacher Pack and Sur (TPS) and Spectrum, Celia ’20 wore her rainbow colored cape while leading a horse through the crowd. Why make such an effort to attract members? With more than 50 clubs and organizations on campus, groups vie to fill their rosters.
The origins and lifespans of clubs and organizations at Thacher differ. Clubs are proposed by students according to their interests. Since it is the nature of a high school for students to come and go, so too do our clubs, as their founders graduate and new students with other interests arrive. Still some, like the Photography Club and the Thacher Political Alliance (TPA), have been around for years. At the Lefty Club table, staffed by seniors Will and Lila, students took the “Try to Write with Your Left Hand Challenge.” Cate ’21 declared the Surf Club “cool” because of its energetic leaders and because she wants to learn how to surf. They also showed surf videos. Clubs with a more understated appeal, such as The Tea Club, followed the time-tested strategy of positioning their tables next to popular clubs to attract the spillover. But it was their tea samples that enabled them to sort the merely curious from the aficionados.
Organizations, on the other hand, are School-sponsored groups that persist across multiple years. The two dozen choices include service organizations like the Environmental Action Committee (EAC) and Math Tutors, affinity groups such as Latinos Unidos, Spectrum, and Jewish Students Union, literary-focused organizations such as El Archivero, and academically-focused groups such as Astronomy/Observatory and Robotics.
Activities sponsored by these groups fill evenings and weekends. One of the more active groups, the EAC, holds the annual Green Cup Challenge in which dorms compete to improve their conservation efforts—recycling bin contents are weighed, water usage is tracked—with the winning dorm earning a pizza party. The Kitten Club is fostering a mother cat and her litter and recently invited the community to help find names for the family. Roller skating, miniature golfing, faculty vs student sports games, and the recent carnival are just a few of the Indoor Committee’s activities. The Polar Plunge club is for those students willing to test their fortitude by jumping into the unheated pool during the winter.
By the time the recruiting fairs came to a close, each club and organization had added a host of new names to its roster and renewed its supplies of curiosity, enthusiasm, and commitment for the coming year.
Thanks to Ian ’20, a Thacher media head reporter, for contributing to this story.
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