With the new school year at Edmond Memorial High School (EMHS), club sign-ups have also been brought to the table, although it’s not as exciting as many remember.

Just like the 2020-2021 school year, the club sign-ups are virtual this year and it’s very disappointing. In previous years, the club sign-up time was similar to that of an art fair: looking at the different club stations and seeing what they had to offer. Sadly, with it now going online, the thrill of taking time out of class to go look at what clubs are available is now a boring scroll through different slides. 

This previous year, club sign-ups had been in person and while needing to become accustomed to the “normal” year since COVID-19, it was still an exciting change from sitting in the classroom quietly doing work. For the freshman, who knows if they will experience the joy of looking at a club to see what they offer like the students before them. As for the upperclassmen this year, that opportunity may never come around again.

Clubs are an important part of the high school experience, whether it be taking part in a project for the art club or competing in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Without first impressions, a student won’t know what the club is like and the people that orchestrate it. With the twenty-three clubs this year, a lot of them are based on in-person contact and seeing what the environment is like is crucial to the students’ enjoyment and experience coming from that club. Making it more frustrating, when the google form was sent out for signing up, the link was blocked. If it were in-person, that wouldn’t have been a problem.

Not everything about switching to a virtual platform for signing up is particularly terrible, but it is rather uneventful and only makes high school a bit more dull, especially when the previous two years have been quite exhausting. The reasoning behind this sudden change is truly unknown, but any plausible reason like COVID-19 and other illnesses is simply pushed away since the school still holds assemblies where students are pushed up together in the bleachers, which is more contact than what the club event could be. 

Switching to virtual is inevitably a controversial choice, since there are quite a bit of pros and cons involved. Despite that, the reasoning does not make sense and only pushes the importance of clubs aside and deteriorates the fun of extracurriculars.

Contact Jordan Graham at [email protected]