INTRAMURALS 2024: BENCH YELL ERA

Credits: dang photography

On March 6, 2024, my classmates, Graze, Janela, and I auditioned for the upcoming Bench Yell to be held during Intramurals. We practiced our piece within a day, without any preparations for it. Particularly, because I just recently read the piece that Janela composed. We tried to polish our audition piece before going to the room where the audition would be held. When we got there, most people already finished reciting their own pieces and all eyes were on us during this time. The person in charge of the auditioning, Miss Gwen Barrera, analyzed our voices to see if it's deep and strong enough to be qualified to perform at Intramurals. Graze and Janela did well, but when it was my turn, I started to feel nervous and tried to deepen my voice because my normal voice is like a teenage girl's. Miss Gwen was still concluding if she would let me in or not. At the end of the day, I passed the audition and started to attend the practices the next day.

credits: jean ashley Valiente

At first, I was anxious because I wasn't prepared to meet new people. It's ironic, especially since I am a HUMSS Student. So, the first two weeks of finishing the entire piece went well and I haven't had any conversation with a different person in the room. But when the props-making began, I realized that I wasn't gonna be confident if the only people that I was talking to were Graze and Janela. I tried to connect with other people to build my confidence for the upcoming competition. The first person that I began to talk to was Deisi, she was my seatmate at that time. I was too shy to approach her at first because she was a confident and funny person and my social skills began to deteriorate at that time. But surprisingly, she made me feel safe and we became friends during the preparations. The second person that I became close to was Jean, the person who took the picture above. Jean is so kind and pure, her smile is contagious and we easily began to click with each other. After that, I felt a boost of confidence flow inside my body and I didn't realize that I had become acquainted with half of the people inside the room. 

A week has passed and the competition is just a day ahead. All of us are pumped and ready to perform against other strands. We practiced the entire yell and we almost made it to perfection. On the day of the competition, we were confident and had a fresh start, but unfortunately, a technical error happened. The banner that was supposed to be put up at the end of our performance got stuck and we didn't have an awesome ending. Some of the members lost hope of winning but one of the leaders during the practice, Jasper, had an idea to be able to lift it up again during the performance of the HUMSS 11 Cheer Dance Group. The audience applauded when we regained ourselves and raised the banner, once again. After the deliberation of the winners, we accepted that we lost because of it. Later, it was replaced with an ecstatic reaction when they announced that HUMSS 11 won the Cheer Dance category. For us, their win is also our win. 

Acknowledgment:

Having the opportunity to perform for many people was an overwhelming experience and was worth it. I would like to give praise to Ms. Gwen Barrera and Ms. Diane Poblete, who supervised us while we were rehearsing, to Joshua Canlas, who became our conductor during that time, to Jasper Malihan, who helped us improve the steps of our performance and to Graze Coliflores, who also help us modulate our voice even better. These people deserve the recognition of being known because they did their job wisely. And lastly, to my fellow peers at the Bench Yell (y'all are too many to mention), this is a fun experience that has happened to me. I hope that we're able to recreate it once again next year. 💗