Caption: Felipe Morales and David Choi help build tacos while Jun Yoshikawa prepares beverages and encourages people to come buy a class dinner. [by Stephen Meier]
by Marianne Meikle
Providing food during the PACA home games requires a lot of planning and effort beforehand. At PACA, the responsibility of selling food to student athletes and sports spectators is shared among the student leadership elected at the beginning of the school year.
Class dinners are organized by the leadership of each of the high school grades in order to raise money for their classes. These high school students have the opportunity to sell food and drinks whenever they have a home game at school. The main point of these dinners is to raise money for their classes.
The class dinners are mostly organized by PACA’s athletic director, Renato Sousa, because he is also in charge of the social life committee for STUCO. This is a new role for STUCO and a new position for Sousa. He helps the class officers create a schedule that gives each grade several opportunities to create a meal plan, purchase the items they need and then provide the manpower to sell the food outside the pop shop on the day of the game.
Lucas Ham Swisher (known as Mr. Ham) is the spiritual life committee supervisor for STUCO. Although he is not responsible for helping students prepare for their class dinners, he has observed some key components that help these events be successful.
From his point of view, Ham says that everything goes well when there is good communication between the class representatives, STUCO officers, and the class sponsors. Even when there are challenges, this helps people to be patient while working together.
Another key component for Ham is providing a variety of eating options from different classes. Mr. Ham observed that when the menu becomes repetitive, then the class meals start to become dreary.
For example, after the first class dinner offered pizza, several class dinners served hot dogs as the main part of their meal plan. At the end of one sophomore meal, it was observed that there was still a full pot of cooked hotdogs that did not get sold during the game.
Nevertheless, this class found their class dinner to be a success due to the variety in their snacks and desserts. Their first class dinner featured cupcakes made with American “root beer” extract (which is a non-alcoholic soda that looks a lot like Pepsi or Coca-Cola but is flavored with sarsaparilla herbs). These frosted cupcakes were a big hit of the evening.
The freshman class had their first class dinner on the 23 of september. Hideki Yoshikawa is the freshman class vice president and thought their first class dinner was a great success. He says that there was a lot of teamwork and it was well organized. Although they also served hot dogs, the variety came in the marketing of ‘American-style’ hotdogs which they attempted to replicate by using fresh french bread rolls and American condiments.
Even though it was a success, he said that initially it was very stressful. In the end, everything worked out really well due to the amount of people who attended the event and purchased food.
The first class to steer away from pizza and hotdogs was on Thursday, October 3, when the junior class sold tacos as their main course for the class dinner. This meal plan is a fan favorite, but requires a lot of careful planning and execution due to the complex levels of condiments that are used for such a meal.
More home games are scheduled for the last few weeks of October and early weeks of November before the current sports seasons are completed. To find out what class dinners will be offered at the upcoming games, please check below.
Home Game Dinner Plans (beginning at 5pm)
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Location: Pop Shop
Thursday, October 17 – STUCO – pizza dinner
Wednesday, October 23 – 9th grade – pizza and chicken nuggets
Friday, October 25 – 11th grade – undecided
Tuesday, Nov. 5 – STUCO – undecided
