By: Nathaniel de Sam Lazaro

This Friday, students at Highland Park Senior High will gather for pep fest. Chants of “Go home freshmen” will roar through the gym. The nominees for homecoming royalty will march out onto the gym floor, hoping to be the ones who get to sit on their grade’s respective throne. That night, students will gather for the homecoming dance, and the next day Highland will have their annual homecoming football game.

But this tradition is not unique to our school. If you went to every High School in America, most of them will have similar traditions to these. Many colleges and universities have homecoming celebrations, too. Homecoming is an American cultural tradition, present in High School movies and TV, so ubiquitous that we often don’t consider how this tradition began.

While more associated with High Schools today, homecoming actually began as a college tradition. Three different schools claim to be the originator of homecoming. Many news outlets, including a piece on the history of homecoming from Active.com, give credit to the University of Missouri, which invited alumni back to their school to “come home” for a football game in 1911. The next year, they continued to do so and have for every year since.

However, there are other claims. The University of Illinois claims to have invented homecoming one year earlier, hosting their first “homecoming” in October of 1910 against their rival, Chicago. This homecoming was an experiment but was so popular that it returned the next year, and continuing ever since except for 1918 when it was canceled due to the flu pandemic (Illinois did host a homecoming in 2020, but it was scaled back and reworked).

Accolades however, for inventing homecoming may belong to Texas’s Baylor University.

The Baylor Alumni Association claims that Baylor has the oldest homecoming, which occurred in the fall of 1909 when alumni were surprised to receive invitations back to their alma mater for a special football game. However, Baylor didn’t call this homecoming at the time, referring to it as “good will week”, and wouldn’t host their next homecoming until 1915, and it only became an annual celebration in 1934.

High schools soon adopted homecoming as a tradition, starting in the 1930s. They adapted the tradition in some ways as well, inventing homecoming court and changing the opponent of the football game from the school’s biggest rival to a team the school would likely beat, keeping high spirits during the festivity.

Highland’s homecoming game this year will be at Humboldt High School at 1 PM on Saturday, September 21st. We will be playing against Harding. Before the game you can enjoy the Powerpuff game at 9 AM and tailgating at 10:00 AM, both at Highland.