For the seniors taking a trip down memory lane, the 2021 school year was a gift for some, and a nightmare for others. I, personally, was desperate to go back to in-person learning throughout all of the online instruction year, and cohorts were too confusing and sporadic to get back to normalcy. It wasn’t until the next year when we went back to school that I realized the sheer amount of clubs and extracurriculars at West. The difference between the closed-off atmosphere of middle school and the things you could now do in high school felt like a huge gain of freedom to me, and I wanted as much as I could get of club activity.
After my COVID year, clubs were packed and lively. The first photography club meeting I ever attended was so full that several students couldn’t even find a desk to sit at, but everybody was just happy to be there. But now, it seems like club interest has dwindled to be practically nonexistent. Even some of the biggest clubs on campus have cut numbers by more than half, and some clubs have died out to the point of shutting down, some during this year and others planning to as the year closes out. Photography club had changed from a place where people could meet and share common interests, to a club where most meetings were either canceled to low attendance or spent discussing how we could try to get underclassmen interested again.
That is where I think the problem lies, underclassmen simply aren’t interested in clubs anymore. As for why, I just feel like people don’t care. While it saddens me to see all of the great clubs that make West unique die out, it’s up to them now to bring them back, not me. A lot of what gets you into good colleges lies in extracurriculars, and with the insanely competitive college application field we have now, I can only hope that their college applications will survive out there without extracurriculars to back them up.
