The Assembly That Celebrates Students’ Accomplishments and Yet Puts Them To Sleep

How the Winter Sports Awards Ceremony Has Become Excruciatingly Long 

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is the way the motto goes, yet the Middlesex athletic awards program seems to switch formats every season and, I would suggest, for the worse. This past week the Middlesex athletics assembly returned to its original format of in-person speeches given by the winter captains. For those who have never experienced the hour-long sports announcement, it goes something like this: “We would like to thank our amazing coaches… Although the results weren't what we wanted, we persevered and fought hard… My favorite part of the season was the bus rides home.” Our winter teams clearly tend to struggle when the highlight of the past two months is the weekly stops at Chipotle while on the way back to campus from a loss or the 10 boxes of Comella’s pizza waiting in the team room after a game. With eight varsity sports already having gone to the podium to speak with each repeating the typical three-minute spiel, it is pretty disheartening when the Alpine Ski Team is the 9th team to make an appearance at 10:30 in the morning. And that says something, because I was named one of the ski racing captains for next year. Don’t get me wrong, I love Middlesex sports and the concept of the award ceremony. The school gets to celebrate the success (or lack thereof) of all of its athletic teams (and the student body is able to acknowledge the countless accomplishments of their fellow Middlesex athletes, but when the amber alert during the wrestling team’s speech is the most interesting event in this winter’s ceremony, something needs to change, or at least go back to the way it previously was). 

The awards ceremony is too long, the format is logistically complicated, and the content frankly bores the students. Thankfully, there is a plausible solution and a strategy that has worked well in previous seasons for the Athletics Department. In the past few years since COVID-19, the captains’ speeches have been performed through a video which is then projected to the whole school. The captains recap their season while a slideshow of pictures and videos plays over them, allowing the audience to stay engaged with the speeches and watch their friends and team’s memories appear on the big screen. The video format is well-organized, and the videos instantly get to the point, leave out the awkward pauses in between team presentations, and provide a personal approach allowing the students to hear from the athletes themselves and keeping the theater entertained and not sleeping in their seats.

So why doesn’t the Middlesex Athletics Department just stick to this more modern and efficient awards presentation method? Well, the in-person speeches definitely bring an intimate experience to the students. They force the audience to give their undivided attention to each and every sport and take a break from their technology-filled academic day. If the whole ceremony was online, there would be no need for an assembly at all. Without the captains on stage, the Athletics Department could just send out the videos, giving the students no real reason to celebrate the accomplishments of their classmates. Since Middlesex is a school that requires full participation in sports, it makes sense that the Athletics Department would request the focus of over 400 students and want the awards assembly to be in person.

So, what’s the solution between modernity and personalization? The most logical approach is that the athletic awards ceremony should be a hybrid option where the captains make their speeches in a video, with clean-cut transitions and photos overlaid with their voices, while the awards are still presented, and the next season captains are named in person for the whole school to recognize together. With this approach, the announcements would run quicker, athletes would have their voices heard, and by the time the last team recaps their season, an amber alert wouldn’t be the highlight of the morning.

Ryan Wolff