By Brinya Tananone, Athletic Director
Back in the Spring of 2014 a relatively young Athletic Director who was going to start his role as YIS AD in the Fall of that coming year was introduced to a group of 8 enthusiastic Athletic Council members who called themselves the Dragon Council (DC). At the time the group was relatively new and was just starting to formulate what they wanted the group to look like and how they would make the group appeal to other YIS students. In the beginning, DC was exclusively responsible for scorekeeping all of the volleyball, basketball, and soccer matches at YIS. There were lots of ideas about what else they wanted to do, but with only 8 students simply scorekeeping was more than enough. It was a lot of hard work, yet they had a blast running things and even more importantly enjoyed having been given such an important responsibility.
It was in large part due to the responsibility and ownership given to those students (not to mention the free t-shirts they got), that seemed to appeal to other students and in the most grassroots method possible 1 or 2 more students would join every so often until by the end of 2015, DC had doubled in size to 16 students!
16 was a nice number and allowed for the DC to start and expand beyond simply scorekeeping all the games. There were t-shirt designs for sport teams and AISA tournaments, they organized a concession stand and set their own prices (might have run at a loss at first), and began video recording tournament matches. They took on the responsibility for running the sports award ceremonies, created the promotional posters for big events and took photographs for the yearbook. They were even busier than ever and slowly but surely the number of students in the club grew to 25!
With 25 students now in the club it was decided that it would be beneficial to have a leadership group within DC that would be responsible for running the meetings, assigning people tasks and in general being an extension of the AD. As such, a president, vice president, treasurer and public relations position were created that have carried on to this day. That group worked tirelessly to build upon what they had helped create and for the next 3-4 years DC became a very well oiled machine that was student led and appealing to more and more students. It got to the point where by 2019, DC had reached 35 students and it was getting hard to find roles for everyone to do!
Like many things in the world, DC was humming along until COVID, which obviously took its toll on everyone and with the lack of athletics really took a toll on the DC as there was little that they could do, and even littler motivation. The number of students in the club understandably dropped and more frustratingly even when they had glimmers of hope to get things up and running, COVID tended to cancel things last minute. However, DC persevered for almost the next 2 years and a huge credit goes to the core group of students who helped keep DC going during those tough times, for once we were given the all clear, DC was back in a big way and all hands were on deck!
With a brand new campus, more facilities, new COVID requirements (ie. live streaming) all of sudden DC was running full tilt and thanks to the fortitude of the remaining DC students, YIS athletics was able to hit the ground running without missing a beat. Sure, there were hiccups along the way, as lost skills needed to be relearned and new skills acquired. More importantly new members were needed as there was more and more to do, and to this end, the post-COVID DC members did better than anyone could have imagined in recruiting new members, for as of November 2024 the HS DC had 60 members! Even better, they have regained their autonomy and ownership of the club, continuing to come up with new ways to grow, in particular the use of social media. The HS DC has become so self-sufficient that we were able to start an MS DC club in the past couple of years which has grown to 25 students, giving DC a total of 85 members!
I am fairly certain that those 8 initial members 10 years ago never could have imagined what their initial vision for a little athletic council would have led to! But I know that they are happy it has.