Hickory High looks to build traditions, alumni loyalty

CHESAPEAKE

For Oscar Smith High School graduates, there is nothing like the Victory Bell.

Players touch it on their way to practice. They touch it when they leave. They touch it before stepping onto the field for a game.

The tradition started in 1960, when a member of the school's Key Club decided to ring the bell after every win. But it still has an almost mythical quality, as if football players had been touching a bell for good luck since the beginning of time.

Across town, at Hickory High School - a 12-year-old school still struggling to build its alumni base - Principal Woodley J. Koonce III wants his own kind of Victory Bell. But he doesn't want to wait for it to come about on its own.

In an effort to inspire more devotion in future Hickory alumni, Koonce is embarking on a project to start up new customs at his school. His hope is that, eventually, they'll develop into the kind of long-standing traditions, like Oscar Smith's bell, that give a school its identity.

One idea: setting up 5-foot-tall lighted letters that spell out the name of the school's mascot, "HAWKS," near the football field. He's also thinking about creating a commemorative wall for Hickory High veterans and setting up an alumni tent during football games.

Traditions "just kind of unfold sometimes, and they can't always be established. But I think sometimes they can be," he said. "We don't want to wait 40 years to make these connections. Why not do it while we're young, and we're new?"

Founded in 1996, Hickory's first graduates are reaching their 30s - a time, Koonce said, when they might be looking to settle down and give back to their old high school.

But in a city where multiple generations of families have gone to the same high school, Hickory officials are finding that their teenage school doesn't have the same draw as schools with long, storied legacies like Oscar Smith, founded in 1954, or Great Bridge High School, which opened in 1907.

At football games, "these people show up, and they are die-hard Oscar Smith fans," said Kevin Cole, a former athletic director at Oscar Smith who now teaches at Hickory.

And the Victory Bell plays a big role in bringing graduates back, said Todd Parker, the current athletic director at Oscar Smith.

The original bell came from Rena B. Wright High School in South Norfolk. When that school closed, and Oscar Smith opened, the bell sat in storage until the Key Club pulled it out again to ring after games. It became so beloved that, when Oscar Smith moved from South Norfolk to a new building on Great Bridge Road, the bell came with it.

"After a victory... tons and tons of fans gather around just to see that bell go off," Parker said. "If you graduated from Oscar Smith, you know exactly why it's being rung."

And when the Victory Bell cracked several years ago, it was a group of alumni that got together to come up with a replacement bell, Parker said.

A good alumni base can be an asset to a high school, said Grassfield High School Principal Carolyn Bernard.

Before joining Grassfield, which opened in 2007, Bernard was principal at Great Bridge. Once, she decided she was tired of seeing her student athletes sitting on gray metal chairs while they were benched. She'd noticed at other schools that they had cushioned chairs, decorated with the school's colors and mascot. So she called 15 of her former students.

Thanks to their efforts, she raised $15,000 in a month, she said.

Before Grassfield opened, Bernard had students help design the school seal, pick their school mascot and colors, and write the words to their alma mater. Administrators wanted students to know that they were forming the identity of the new school with everything they did that year, Bernard said.

In time, Hickory will develop traditions on its own, Koonce said, and some are likely to come from the students themselves.

In the meantime, he said, why not try to jump-start the process with some ideas of his own?

"It ain't magic," Koonce said. "We have to make it happen."

Alicia Wittmeyer, (757) 222-5216, alicia.wittmeyer@pilotonline.com