Being a Southern girl, if I attend a football game I dress up. As a high-school freshman I would support my hometown football team in jeans and a cute top, and whenever our team made a touchdown I would do push-ups with the rest of the Cross-Country team. Silly, but a fun tradition for my lone public high school year.

When I started boarding school it was a whole other world. I had heard stories from my parents, and had witnessed it through the W&L community, about dressing up for sporting events – particularly football – but attending my first Woodberry Forest football game changed everything. “The Game,” WFS’s game against Episcopal High School was the penultimate. The first game I went to between the two schools was “The 100th Game” in 2000. It was announced in the Virginia General Assembly and covered on ESPN, for goodness sake! +/- 15,000 attended the events that weekend, and Woodberry won. It was an awesome moment and such a big deal!

You may be wondering, why Woodberry Forest in particular? Woodberry Forest is Chatham Hall’s ‘brother school,’ so we attend any event that they hold – similar to a fraternity-sorority relationship in college. From my first “Game” on, I have always felt like you are not really supporting the school unless you are dressed to the nines, staying warm (possibly drinking from a friend’s flask, as I never was ballsy enough for a fake ID, let alone a flask!), and wearing a six-footer… all of which applied to football games when my Mom was in high school and college as well! (PS a six-footer is a scarf, most often worn in the school’s colors).

What do you wear to football games?