This year’s South Winter Ball was originally scheduled for February 9th. Unfortunately, on the first of February, the dance was cancelled. The dance was also cancelled last year due to a lack of interest. These consecutive cancellations leave questions of how the dance will change and how the student council will proceed with its planning in years to come.
According to sophomore president Max Jin, the two major issues with the Winter Ball have been scheduling and advertising.
“Scheduling was better last time because they had Snow-coming planned ahead of time, like on the district calendar to my knowledge,” Jin said. “They would have that already a year ahead and everything would already be planned out.”
This year, the dance was more last-minute and not planned before the year began.
“We started advertising pretty close to the date of the dance, about 2 weeks,” said sophomore fundraising officer Shae Gruber.
According to Gruber, the majority of advertising was done through Instagram, and it might be more effective in the future to do advertising in person through posters around the school.
Jin agreed that advertising was difficult, specifically due to the dance being scheduled in January or February. “It’s right after winter break, there’s all sorts of testing, everyone is busy.”
Ideas for alternatives to the Winter Ball have been discussed as well.
The sophomores have even proposed turning it into a Valentine’s Day Dance rather than a winter dance.
“I think that the Winter Ball, the name we went with, kind of had the same negative connotation,” said Gruber, “We were thinking that if we totally rebranded it, then maybe it would get more people that would not associate it with Snow-coming.”
The fate of the winter dance still lies in consideration. One possibility that has been acknowledged by the sophomore officers is waiting until the 2025-2026 school year to implement the Winter Ball again, whatever form it may take.
“We may have to wait until our senior year because then we would have two new classes who have not experienced any kind of shortcomings with this dance,” Jin explained.
Moving forward, changes are expected to be made in order to ensure the Winter Ball’s success at South, and there is hope for it to improve in the coming years.
