Step back into the days of physical ballot boxes, printed flyers, and locker-to-locker gossip. Long before group chats coordinated outfit themes and digital portals handled game tickets, faculty members navigated a completely authentic experience. We caught up with teachers to look back at homecoming as it used to be.
By Cody Sample
Today, finding out who won homecoming royalty or checking the Friday night football score takes less time than screen unlocking. We live in a world of shared Spotify playlists, group chats, and digital student portals that keep everyone synced by the second.
But for the teachers our hallways today, high school looked a lot different. Decades ago, before smartphones or the internet. Before you could put your status up on your profile page, homecoming was ran on paper, physical ballot boxes, and a lot of hallway action.
A few faculty members are gonna tell you about what spirit week and the big dance were actually like back when everything wasn’t digital.
For teachers like Mr. White, homecoming week meant spending hours out on the practice field at Sierra Vista working on class floats rather than a baseball diamond. Instead of scrolling through social media highlights, memories were captured on actual film from behind a camera lens.
“I never was in the student section because I was on Gigantea, so I was always on the sidelines,” White said, noting that he worked as a photo editor shooting the game on real film. “When I started teaching, my kids were little, and I remember having my boys come to the parade.”
Back when these faculty members were in high school the soundtrack of the halls was entirely different too. White remembers listening to a heavy rotation of 90s indie rock and grunge, while Mr. Vieira leaned toward a completely different era of heavy hitters.
Vieira, who played football at Tulare Union– where the ultimate rivalry game was known as the Bell Game. There was only 2 campuses in the area; He remembered it as a campus divided strictly down school lines.
“A lot of Eminem, a lot of Fat Joe, Jay-Z was really big… and a lot of punk rock like blink-182” Vieira said, reflecting on the tracks that dominated school events and dances back then.
Unlike today’s digital nomination forms, Vieira noted that his school skipped the typical top-five nomination structure, allowing everyone nominated to actively participate in lunchtime activities for a high level of student involvement.
Meanwhile, Mr. Woodbury spent his homecoming days at Mount Whitney High School building cardboard city-themed structures in jazz band instead of practicing music. “We just took a week off of jazz band just to kind of paint that,” Woodbury said, mentioning that he even painted his shoes to commemorate the project before playing tunes right behind their float.
As for traditions outside of building floats, Woodbury laughed about local food habits: “People in band would say, ‘Oh yeah, every homecoming, we go to Porta Subs, and we eat a 30-inch sub,’ and they’d go to the homecoming game and almost puke.”
Though musical tastes varied from Woodbury’s preference for metal, rap, and hip-hop to Vieira’s hip-hop classics, one thing remains clear across all their stories: high school spirit ran just as high back then– it just took a lot more cardboard, film rolls, and physical work to pull it off.
Cody Sample
Cody '28, is a junior in his first year of journalism at Redwood. He is a passionate Arts & Entertainment writer, and he loves telling stories!
Tags: arts & entertainment, homecoming, homecoming 2026, homecoming 2026-2027, Redwood, redwood gigantea, redwood high school, redwood journalism, redwood rangers, rhs, visalia ca
