Posts encourage recognition, draw a larger student crowd
n any given Friday afternoon during the winter sports season, junior and member of the Horde Board Addie Click creates a collage of action photos from the boys and girls varsity basketball teams and the boys varsity soccer team. Once finished, she posts it on the Horde’s Instagram, an account many students follow, hoping to entice students and faculty to watch and support the teams.
Instagram has been a platform known to highlight events or to enlighten other communities about recent and ongoing news. While individual sports Instagram accounts are engaging and informative, not all upper school students follow each sport’s account. To reach everyone, the student body created an Instagram account in April of 2021 called The Horde where upper school students can post about sports games to inspire spirit and encourage other students to support their classmates.
“On The Horde, I post game updates, themes, scores, SPC rankings and anything that has to do with school spirit,” Click said. “During football season, I posted scenes from the stands, including what people were wearing and the cheers we were doing.”
The Horde account was originally a Facebook page where students hadto download Facebook and ask to join the group. The Horde board, a group of eight upper school students from freshmen to seniors, made the executive decision to switch to an Instagram account as more students now use Instagram than FaceBook.
“When the board had its first meeting, we were thinking of ways to get the student body involved more in spirit and attendance at games,” Click said. “When we asked our friends if they have Facebook the answers were mostly no. We thought using Instagram would be a great idea because more people are active on it.”
Some of our sports teams have recently taken action to create their own Instagrams while others have continued to post on it to update the community on upcoming games.
“The purpose of a team Instagram account is to get parents, teachers and other people involved with their students’ [or] kids’ athletic life,” senior and girls varsity lacrosse player Lily Tollison said. “We use the team Instagram account to allow [people in the community] to stay active with what is going on with the team. A team Instagram account is very fun and definitely something each sports team should have.”
Some teams get creative with what they post on Instagram to help cast an idea of what the teams are like and to get to know some of the players better. The varsity girls lacrosse team has been getting creative and coming up with new ideas on what to post to keep followers updated.
“We wanted to stay very active and post fun things for both the players and parents to enjoy,” Tollison said. “I have posted something called ‘meet the seniors,’ which was an introduction to our 2023 seniors. I have also posted our 2023 varsity schedule, as well as some off-season practice clips. I have many other things in mind for sure [like] a ‘mic’d up’ with a player and a day in the life of a freshman versus a senior.”
Other sports teams have also created accounts like the girls basketball team. They wanted the student body to become more aware of their game times to help come and support them.
“We decided to create an Instagram account this season to promote awareness of the ESD girls basketball program,” junior and varsity basketball player Addison Page said. “We post anything from gameday content to post-victory celebrations to supporting JV or a celebratory stop at Buc-ee’s to show everyone how we are as a team.”
And other teams have decided to update their accounts, like the boys varsity lacrosse team. Alum and former ESD lacrosse player Preston Moderi ‘21 is in charge of the new account: @esdlacrosse.
“The account was created by the captains during my senior year, [and] we wanted to keep the name the same as our Twitter account, ‘esdlacrosse,’” Moderi said. “We wanted to be able to address the student body with our games, promotional content and highlights of the program. Unfortunately, we never had the time to work on the account, [and] it wasn’t until recently that I was asked to run the account due to my background in graphic design and marketing.”
Moderi believes that the lacrosse program should be highlighted, as many of the players go off to play at the collegiate level.
“This account is mainly to highlight the program [because] ESD’s lacrosse program produces many Division 1, 2 and 3 athletes,” Moderi said. “With social media being the predominant spread of knowledge nowadays, it’s a no-brainer that ESD [lacrosse] should have a place in that realm.”
Creating Instagram accounts to spread awareness about sports games or big events is an effective way to get the student body together to help cheer on their teams.
“The goal of posting is to increase the student body’s spirit, raise attendance for each grade and to update all of our followers about the teams at ESD,” Click said. “When everyone attends games, it makes it so much more fun, and everyone has a good time.”