By Ella Kate McCord
This year’s Lovett girl Ultra, Lydia Wilson, has had an exciting “kick-off” to the year by getting to cheer on every sport.
She has always wanted to be an Ultra, and has looked up to many of the other Ultras that have come before her. “I loved how energetic Gibbs was and I always wanted to be like Aiden Taylor, Gunnar’s older sister. They were really great and I wanted to do as good a job as them,” she said.
When I saw Lydia’s name on the list for potential Ultra candidates last year, I knew that she would be perfect for the job. She has always been one of Lovett’s biggest fans in a lot of sports, even as an underclassman.
She is very used to having to get crowds pumped up and talking to younger kids about how to be enthusiastic because of her experience as a camp counselor over the past couple summers. “Brendan and I are both counselors at High Harbour, so we have a lot of the same ideas,” she said.
This made sense to me since they clearly have a good dynamic with each other.
Their camp experience has taught them how to bring a community together, come up with fun cheers, and create fun themes to make people want to show up to more Lovett games.
One of the themes they are very excited to introduce this year: fraternity. She said they had this theme for a dance at camp and that everyone LOVED it and went all out for it. They are hoping that all Lovett students will go all out for this one. And this includes the underclassmen.
“One of my goals for this year is that I want people to start dressing up more, especially the underclassmen, and to ditch the idea that having spirit is embarrassing because it’s only embarrassing if you make it embarrassing,” she said. To try and get rid of this idea, Lydia and Brendan are developing fun ideas to get the underclassmen more involved throughout the game.
For a few football games now, they have been picking an underclassmen boy to come down on the track and start doing pushups. The whole crowd screams out counting down from ten. Not only is it hilarious, but it also has made the underclassmen a lot more connected to the upperclassmen throughout the football games.
Another fun thing that they have launched is “Fan of the Week.” On the Lovett Ultra Instagram, they have started a tradition of picking the biggest fan, who cheered the loudest. Every week, everyone votes for who they think won.
So far, the best game has definitely been the “Battle Of Buckhead,” and it definitely set a high standard for what we need all of the games to look like. “Everyone came and cheered super loud and we won, which was super lit. It was awesome,” Lydia said.
The “white out” theme was perfect, and I think we set a record for how many Lovett students were there and yelling at the top of their lungs. Lydia said that this was one of the most fun games to be on the track for because the whole crowd was going crazy.
She said how easy the cheers were to start because everyone was screaming no matter what. As she was talking, she mentioned how excited she is for the Pace game in hopes that it will be even crazier than the Westminster game.
While she knows how hard it is for students to go to all the games, she said her main goal, is “to get more people to go to sports other than football, like last week I went to see Volleyball at Westminster and I feel like it would be an exciting game for people to see.”
