The theme is “Lights, Camera, Action – A Night in Hollywood” and the occasion is Escalon High School’s 2024 Fall Homecoming celebration.
Festivities are going on all week on the high school campus, with dress up days centered around movies. There was no school on Monday but Tuesday’s dress up day featured Top Gun. Wednesday’s movie is Jaws, Thursday is Rocky and Friday is Friday Night Lights.
Serving as Homecoming Commissioners this year are juniors Gianna Wilson and Natalie Ruiz.
Homecoming Queen candidates are seniors Charlotte Shaddix, Carolina Sandoval, Lisa Murga, Darla Garcia Sandoval and Riley Ogilvie.
Homecoming Princess candidates are freshmen Yesenia Marsellis, Jazlynn Perez and Maci Alvarado, sophomores Aniston Hunt, Jessy-Lynn Kesler and Selah Jansen, juniors Skylar Anderson, Carolina Torres and Marina Franzia.
“The Princess (candidates) are from the freshman, sophomore and junior classes, we saw that a lot of other schools do this and it really uplifts their campus culture. That’s something that we strive for, good campus culture, and for everyone to be involved,” Ruiz explained. “Hopefully the underclassmen who come in, they already feel that excitement to be a part of EHS.”
Wilson and Ruiz have been working for several months to coordinate the week’s festivities.
“Our hope is that it gets our school more involved and gets more people wanting to participate in activities and just to spread more Cougar pride,” said Wilson.
“We are so excited because we have a lot of lunchtime activities, parade festivities, the Homecoming game,” Ruiz said. “A lot of things that we have never seen before and new traditions that we’re adding that we hope will carry on for a while.”
Friday afternoon will feature the downtown Homecoming parade at 2:30 p.m., with plenty of floats, music, school and community groups, the Homecoming courts and Grand Marshals for the 2024 parade, Ray and Cathy Scott.
Game time is at 5 p.m., starting with the JV contest and the varsity football game about 7 p.m., as the teams welcome Ripon Christian to town.
“I’m most looking forward to halftime, I just hope everything goes smoothly and just seeing all the candidates get their moment,” Wilson said.
She added that planning for this Homecoming actually started at the end of last school year and also included several meetings over the summer, in addition to fine tuning things this past week.
“Friday we’re looking for the team to really get that teamwork going, we know they have been working really hard,” Ruiz said of the varsity football Cougars. “We just hope that they have the motivation and that they know that they can do great things because they have worked so hard for it.”
Varsity head football coach Andrew Beam said the team needs to be ready to go on Friday night, as they square off with a Ripon Christian team coming off a big win over Ripon, 30-6.
“They are very well coached and very fundamentally sound,” Beam said of the Knights. “I know a lot of people from Escalon go to Ripon Christian (school) so this will be a game with a lot of familiar faces … we’re excited to play them.”
