Many know Los Locos as our student section that makes every home football game memorable, but not many know what really goes into the lead-up of the games. Let’s take an inside look at what it takes within the Los Locos team for the Student Section to run smoothly.

Every week, everybody sees the lights, the smoke, the sparklers, the music, and everything else associated with our Cathedral Catholic High School Student Section for football games. Abe Rhodes, a Senior transfer student helping to run Los Locos, reflects on what he has heard about the CCHS Student Section. Rhodes said, “Los Locos is easily the best student section in San Diego because we always bring 100% energy and hype, with great student turnout helping us cheer on our football team and go crazy every Friday.”

But, to make all of this happen, there is a massive team effort to make sure that everything happens accordingly. This work starts days prior to the game even taking place.

The Los Locos leaders begin with a meeting on Wednesday to prepare for the game. There are meetings held with the cheer coaches, with football coaches, and even football players. This is to make sure the team comes up with a plan in order to make sure everything runs smoothly — from football team warmups to cheer performances to halftime routines.

Cheer Captain Danielle Corrao shares how cheer and Los Locos work together saying: “Los Locos is super collaborative with cheer when it comes to playing songs for us to dance to. The DJ, lights, fog, and sparklers really hype up the cheerleaders to continue hyping up our crowd. It’s hard to continue to cheer when your team is losing but Los Locos and cheer work together to keep the student section up beat.”

The largest part of the Los Locos production that tends to go unseen is game day preparation. This starts as early as 7:30 that morning. The whole team is focused on making sure that they have all of the necessary things ready to go and making sure that people know their jobs for the day. The team checks and makes sure that they have all of the music loaded into the computer prior to the game so that we can be ready to go for warmups and game time. Then, they spend about an hour and a half during class time and lunch setting up the whole Los Locos set up that everybody sees every week — the DJ set up, the smoke machines, sparkler machines, the massive truss that the lights hang on, the stand in front of the Student Section that the leaders stand on, and a few other other things. Then, the team does a half hour sound test to make sure all of the speakers are up and running and make sure the sound is ready for the night.

Next, the after school activities. The Los Locos team goes in many different directions to get things for the game. Some go to Escondido every week to pick up CO2 for the smoke gun while others drive to Chula Vista to obtain granules for the cold spark machines. The team gets back to school at least two hours before the game to make sure everything is up and running.

Finally, post game clean up. The Los Locos team tends to stay for about an hour after the game to clean up. They help the facilities team after the game because they do so much for all the students at CCHS. Once the cleaning is done and the team has debriefed from the game, they are finally done for the week.

So, it is safe to say, a lot goes into making sure that the Student Section at football games run smoothly. It isn’t just showing up at game time and cheering — a lot of hard work and commitment from everybody to ensure that everybody else has a good time at the game.