The Leyden High School Blue Crew run by two students, Kara Sandberg and Jessica Borjon, has turned into a huge extracurricular activity. “It just came out of nowhere,” says Kara, Blue Crew co-president. The Blue Crew was started in 2012 to try and create a community within the school but died down after only a year. But it is now back.

It all started with a class project in English II where the students jobs were to come up with new ideas that they wanted to bring to Leyden. Kara and Jessica’s idea being that they wanted to bring back the now dead Blue Crew and bring it to life again, so they took it a step further. After the project was all done and over with the two students wouldn’t let go of the idea. Instead they went to the Student Activities director, Mr Pecucci at the time, and wanted to turn their idea into a reality. By the next school year, after much discussion the 3 came up with days for meetings and ideas to bring.

In result, the Crew focuses on coming up with a theme for most games, new fundraising ideas, and having buses available for every away game. All of these ideas with a main goal of trying to promote student involvement in afterschool activities.

The first meeting was a week before the first football game. By the end of the meeting the Crew had come up with making the football game theme a Black out. Which was the first successful student section theme in 3 years even though it was an away game.

Ever since then the Crew has made a twitter page announcing new themes every week for football, basketball, wrestling, and so on. The twitter page has been a huge success with over 600 followers it is an easy way to get new updates quickly and learn about results from past games.

After talking to dedicated members of the club they had described how the school spirit has increased compared to past years. They explain the club as an easy way to make new friends, and it becoming a community within the school. “The best part about this is that we never expected it to be so big,” says Jessica.

Because it’s all student driven students find themselves more a part of what’s going on. They get to share what they want to happen on certain things and be able to have the authority to make it happen.

Even though the club started at East Leyden it runs events for both East and West. And has become the cushion that students rely on to promote sportsmanship and spirit throughout the school. And it all started from a school project.