It’s not everyday dinosaurs run rampant through the halls. For Homecoming spirit week, seniors Colin Surabian, Spencer Webb, Shaunak Dogra, Julian Gonzalez, Adrian Villanueva, Lauren Roehr, Richie Ospinera, and Nathan Vikhman brought seven foot tall, bright orange, inflatable dinosaur costumes to school to show their spirit and have fun.
The week before Homecoming is always filled with excitement, crescendoing on Friday with the pep rally, the parade, the game, and at its greatest peak at the Homecoming dance. Tuesday through Thursday’s spirit days followed the “soaring through Neverland” theme, but as per tradition, Friday was dedicated to class colors. This year — along with several other creative costumes — the seniors decided to take it up a notch.
“The dinosaur costume is orange which is the senior color,” said Dogra. “I thought it was a good way to show some school spirit. And also I thought it was really fun to just dress up as a dinosaur and run around the school.”
If anyone knows Colin Surabian, this wasn’t his first rodeo. In his sophomore year, he bought the dinosaur costume for Halloween and for fun, decided to wear it to school.
“I saw a lot of funny videos, clips, pictures, all of that of pranks where people would run into random places with the dinosaur costumes,” Surabian said. “I thought you know what? I want to do that, too.”
He said, “It was a ton of fun, and then junior year, I did the same thing around Halloween,” Surabian said. Additionally, he convinced Webb to join him in bringing an inflatable BayMax costume as well.
This year, with much more campaigning and persuasion, he convinced six others to join in on the fun. “Thinking of how much more fun that would be with eight people really drove my anticipation [for Friday].”
Webb explained that this year, “We just wanted a herd of dinosaurs.”
He said that they had a group chat with everyone dressed in dinosaur costumes, and each time someone got theirs, they sent a picture to hype each other up for the big day.
“It’s one thing thinking about it,” Surabian began, “but when you’re actually running through the halls in the costume [in] the moment…, I think it was just really great to see how everyone was embodying that same character in the dinosaur costume.”
After terrorizing the school in the morning, the dinosaurs reconvened at A lunch to run around and pose to take photos with intrigued students. Lastly, they set forth on their last march together to wreak havoc at the pep rally. Villanueva continued to wear his dinosaur costume to represent the Spanish Honors Society float at the Homecoming parade that evening.
“I enjoyed running through the gym when we were going through the pep rally and people were giving me high fives,” mused Dogra.
This dinosaur invasion had been a roaring success, but there’s more to expect from these eight seniors.
“I think at the end of the year everyone should buy a dinosaur costume and wear it to school,” Dogra laughed, “because that would be awesome.”
