Dimond High School has had a long-standing tradition of having two students from the senior class be chosen as the Spirit Commissioners. These two students must show exceeding amounts of Dimond spirit.

What is a spirit commissioner, and what do they do at Dimond?

In years past, the Dimond spirit commissioners have been very involved in roles around the school. They do the morning announcements daily, and also help organize and run assemblies. 

The commissioners usually show up to Lynx sports games and lead the student section in cheers to energize the team. No matter what, these two individuals are always involved in school-sponsored activities.

Dimond Senior Ian Cruickshank said, “The leadership involved with the assemblies” was the biggest role the previous commissioners played.

Every year at Dimond, classmates run against each other in order to be elected for certain positions in Student Government. Planning on carrying on this school tradition, Dimond Seniors Ian Cruikshank and Zavier Hajdukovich ran for their spots as spirit commissioners and won.

However, this year has been a little different. The COVID-19 pandemic has completely changed the roles of the two spirit commissioners. 

To overcome this challenge, Cruishank and Hajdukovich have creatively made a way for them to still be involved as commissioners. They had to figure out how they would carry on the tradition.

When telling the story of how they navigated around the problem, Cruickshank said, “We have to do announcements some way.” 

He continued by saying, “Let’s do a digital announcement, and it can be all the announcements for the week.”

The combo records, edits and uploads YouTube videos every Monday about everything coming up in the following week.

These announcements include dates and times of Lynx sports games, Dimond club announcements and many other miscellaneous news or events.

Cruickshank said, “Including skit writing, it takes like two hours.”

Collectively, the two seniors have been making these videos since the start of the year. 

Hajdukovich said about 30 Monday announcements have been created and published.

However, there were a few problems while trying to make these announcements. Cruickshank said, “A big problem was finding the time to do them while we did not have 

the class.”

Other problems also emerge while filming as clips are sometimes not perfected until the third or fourth go. 

Hajdukovich said, “ Some days we’ll get it on the first try and then some days we need to do like two or three takes.”

As most announcements uploaded are around two to three minutes each, it is safe to say that there has been over an hour of edited content uploaded. On top of that, each announcement video gets around 400 views which is a quarter of the student body population. 

However, most teachers show these announcements to their students every Monday. So, the number of students these videos reach could be two times that.

Another big help to these videos is Student Government teacher Lem Wheeles.

Cruickshank said, “Mr. Wheeles edits a lot of the announcements.” 

Cruickshank then followed with, “We wouldn’t be able to do it without him.”

By creating these videos the two students have proved that there is always a workaround to a problem.

Even though it was not the year they had hoped for, the two Dimond spirit commissioners accomplished more than expected.