Walk through the men’s locker room at Hastings High School and leave on the other end. In front of the door you will be greeted by another one. This door leads to the old room that contains the school’s out of service pool that has become an oversized closet full of old classroom and sports supplies. However, the items that stand out the most in the room are the lines of trophies standing in the middle of the lot like a hidden shrine.
“There’s at least one hundred twenty trophies in here,” Gregg Holliday, Activities Director, said.
The nicely lined up trophies, mostly dating back to the mid 1980’s to the late 90’s, have always interested students at Hastings High. Many students often wonder why we leave so many trophies left to collect dust in a room shut away instead of being shown off in the hallways like other trophies.
“The main reason why a lot of these trophies are not on display is because the majority of them are not highly valued trophies like state championships for example. Our aim is to keep trophies of high importance on display as long as we possibly can, so students don’t need to worry about us storing away our best achievements in a dark room. Also we try to get rid of the older trophies, ten years is usually the maximum. We would love to buy more trophy cases so we could show off, but the main concern is that fire codes state that the hallways must be a certain width, so adding more trophy cases would be highly difficult,” said Holliday.
But the trophies that lie inside the old room may not be there for much longer. Many ideas have been proposed at meetings and one idea that has been highly considered is an auction. “The event would most likely be at a dinner or a class reunion set up by the school. The trophies would be sold in either lots or single trophies. It would most likely be a silent auction and hopefully we would make a reasonably large amount of money. Then the money would be used to fund programs throughout the school,” says Holliday.
Although there may be many trophies left undisplayed in the school’s hallway, the reasons behind it are understandable. It also seems that the school is well aware of the matter and that the staff is trying to make something positive out of this negative situation. If all is well and everything goes according to plan, we may even be getting more money put into the the school. So having so many trophies hid away from everyone may not be such a bad thing after all.
