The Crowd--and the Dead--Rise at North's First Home Game

By Samantha Gougher

On September 10th, 2016, Council Rock High School North faced off with Coatesville High School in its very first football game of the season. What you may not have heard, however, is that the athletes weren’t the only people battling that night—they were in fact joined by the living dead in a spooky, ooky turn of events.

Most logical people would be quick to disbelieve this completely, one-hundred-percent accurate report of events, but luckily I was present for this monumental moment in our high school’s history. The game started off as normally as possible, with the marching band standing up to provide their take on pop songs during pivotal plays and two-dozen eighth graders running around frantically in the stands like chickens without their heads.

Things began to go awry during the halftime show, directly after the marching band’s rousing performance of Echoes. The music was so enchanting, so unbelievably attention-grabbing, that the literal walking dead burst out of the turf and finally met with the glowing light of the moon. Obviously there was initial panic; Nathan Burns, this year’s Homecoming King, claims that “[O]ne tried asking me what my MySpace profile was… and then I skedaddled away as fast as I could!”

Don’t worry, Council Rock North—there is an explanation for this undead phenomenon. I actually had the honor of interviewing a few of the zombified students, who all were more than happy to tell me their stories.
As we all know, the Council Rock School District built a second high school, South, in 2002, and then dubbed our school North. But what we didn’t know before this game was that during the remodeling of our turf so many years ago, a whole gym class of students was trapped underneath the field.

Apparently the gorgeous music of the marching band and the valiant performance of the athletes are what motivated the early-2000s students to finally break out of their grassy underground prison. But here’s the good news: although disheveled, undesirably denim-clad, and obviously deceased, these kids are pretty much exactly like us. Only instead of iPhones and Twitter, they use Motorola flip phones and MySpace. I’m sure they’ll catch up eventually.

Which brings up to a pivotal question: if this actually happened, why haven’t you seen any zombies hobbling through the Newtown borough lately, riding Razr Scooters and eating civilian’s brains? Well, thanks to our school’s amazing Diversity Committee, these lost students have been found again, finishing up their educations at North and fitting in perfectly with the sleep-deprived, indoor-dwelling students of our school. These zombies, it seems, are fitting in just fine (unless they start talking about AIM).

However, safety is, as always, still a priority to our school. You may have noticed upon returning this September that North has installed cages onto all of its main stairways. This was actually in anticipation of a feral zombie/goblin/overly-bloated tick invasion that just may plague our school sooner than we think.

Please be sure to greet any zombies you see with a smile on your face and the friendly reminder that no, George Bush is not our president anymore. As a reporter I must say that it is amazing how our students have been able to welcome these quirky corpses since that momentous September evening in our very own Walt Snyder Stadium.

Oh, and about the football game: we lost to Coatesville. But we got zombies, so who’s the real winner here? I think you can answer that question for yourself.  Happy Halloween, Council Rock North!

---