Keeping Up Traditions

For the past 16 years in a row, Cape Henry Collegiate has hosted the annual “Race at the Cape” and “Fall Festival”  in the hope to bring past alumni and current members of our CHC community together for a day of competitive racing, games, and fun.

This year, Cape Henry had a tremendous amount of people from our community come out, including seniors and past alum who helped out and participated in both events. According to multiple current seniors who have participated in years past, 2017 blew away any other year based on participation from our upper school. The upper school participants helped create a fun and exciting environment in which the kids seemed to really enjoy.

After the race, kids piled into the school’s gym to get a chance to play some fun activities while the adults browsed the clothing, food, and books that were all available for sale. Each of these stations, whether game-based or sales-based, was hosted by a wide variety of clubs at Cape Henry. There were games from bowling, ring toss, and robotic maneuvering all the way to racing through the ginormous bounce houses set up in the center of the gym or playing our own version of musical chairs/cake walk with our Dolphin mascot.

Each game was creatively manipulated and twisted in fun ways in order to get kids more interested and participating in all the games, not just the main attractions. For instance, according to Aaron Torres (‘18), the Virginia Altruists Club led by Mr. Facemire, had the idea to stack bowling pins in certain orders to create different levels of difficulties for the kids.  Also another club had the idea to manipulate their game of traditional ball toss and made it into where the kids could get creative and bounce the balls off walls and objects in order to get it into the plastic cup.

Nathan Branson (‘18) also played a key role in making sure kids were having the most fun as possible.  Branson played the role as Cape Henry’s mascot, the Dolphin. He says that this year’s Fall Festival had a amazing support from anyone who had ever been a part of the Dolphin community as well as some new faces who were looking to get involved. Branson also agrees to the fact that this year’s senior participation was outstanding compared to any other year he has been a member at Cape Henry. Along with Nathan Branson, Corey Jones (‘18) shared his thoughts about how the senior class impacted Fall Festival. Jones, who worked on the baseball inflatable, offered, ”Having seniors participate created a more friendly environment for the kids and made it less intimidating for them to ask to play games for they were seeing many familiar faces.”

Without the help from the Upper School students, this year’s Race at the Cape/Fall Festival would not have been nearly as successful and spectacular as it was this time around. When our members of Cape Henry talk about community being one of our core values, this is what they mean. Dedicated students were part of an event that benefits others around them, while also benefiting from the worthy causes and the diverse clubs that represent Cape Henry as a whole.

With the same planning and participation, every future Race at the Cape/Fall Festival should have a greater amount of people getting involved so that our school can advance our clubs’ impact on the community.