The student council recently implemented the “Advisory Report,” a short video series that has been played in advisories during Oct. 4 and Oct. 11. Originally, the advisory report was produced to generate publicity for the student council-sponsored spikeball tournament held on Oct. 16.

“We are going to be making [the reports] every time we need to make a big announcement, so spikeball is a big announcement,” student council vice president Kanming Xu said. “We’re probably going to make one for spirit day. That might be a big announcement as well. But we’re not going to be making them weekly because that’s a lot of work.”

15 teams of four attended the spikeball tournament, which netted a total of $300 in revenue that will be donated to the hurricane-ravaged Nottingham Elementary School in Houston, Texas. Those numbers were five fewer teams and $100 less than Xu and student council president Jaylen Wang’s goal, but Wang believes that the advisory report did play a part in recruiting players.

“I think there were some teams there that, in my opinion, probably wouldn’t have played if they didn’t really know about it,” Jaylen Wang said. “There are always going to be teams that are going to play no matter what, but it’s just about trying to convince people who wouldn’t usually do these types of things to just take a risk and go for it. So, I think it does help.”

Junior Andy Wang agrees with the advisory report’s success in raising participation.

“I mean, just doing a Facebook post about spikeball would have probably been [bad],” Andy Wang said. “But when you do it with all those video examples and everything, it makes it more entertaining and more people would probably want to do it.”

Junior Amanda Armstrong was one of the many students who participated in the spikeball tournament.

“[I participated] because one of my friends asked me,” Armstrong said.

Jaylen Wang indicated that the student council would typically refrain from allowing clubs to use the advisory report as a platform for publicity or member recruitment.

“It’s more just like if your club has something that pertains to the whole school, like if you’re doing a fundraiser that the whole school can take part in,” Jaylen Wang said. “Or if you’re selling things that everyone can buy, then we might say it. But we’re not gonna say, ‘join this club, it’s cool.’”

According to Xu and Jaylen Wang, it took around one and a half to two hours to produce the first video, and only about fifteen to twenty minutes to produce the second.

“I’ve had a decent amount of mixed reactions, and I don’t think that by making these kinds of videos you can appeal to everybody, but I think for the most part I’ve heard positive reactions,” Jaylen Wang said. “Kids have been kind of excited and coming to me with ideas about what they want to see or something funny they want to put on there. Of course, there were kids who obviously think it wasn’t funny, or that it was cringey, which I totally understand. There’s a lot of different people out there.”

Sophomore Jack Wuerfl said that the advisory report would be a good way to occupy students during advisory.

“That’s going to be fun. Last year, we didn’t do anything in advisory,” Wuerfl said. “We kind of just [sat] there. We could never use our phones, we got our phones taken away if we took them out.”

According to Wuerfl, his advisory never took part in any fun activities. “We never went outside, I saw other advisories playing outside, but my advisory didn’t do anything. So I think this is a good, new way to change it up and keep everyone more focused and have something to actually do throughout the advisory.”