As Sandpoint High is adjusting into their new spirit competition against Lakeland High School, both schools’ student councils are adjusting the rules to fit both their needs. After reviewing the scoring rubric we have used for the past two years, Sandpoint High’s student leaders saw problems that could have led to the inaccurate winning or losing of either school. 

In a CP@3 interview with Connor Bird, Baxter Pollard says that “some of the rules were outdated and they didn’t make sense.” So they put their heads together to write a new scoring rubric for this years Battle for the Paddle.

Sandpoint High’s leaders researched other schools’ spirit competitions and their rubrics used for scoring. They noticed that all the schools had a much more open ended way of scoring. The previous judges for Battle for the Pattle had communicated to both Lakeland and Sandpoint’s student councils that they would have preferred a more open ended rubric. 

Learning this, Sandpoint’s student council began rewriting the rules. 

“Some things were weighed improperly,” Pollard comments. In the past years they had a category for each factor in Battle for the Pattle: school spirit, sportsmanship, posters, and all the other small competitions they had in between games. With every factor, the school would be graded on subcategories such as crowd involvement, inclusion of theme, and energy level on a scale from 0 to 5. These subcategories got very confusing. “Scoring were weighted more for smaller things and less for bigger items,” explains Pollard. Because they wouldn’t correlate with certain competition’s description on how they should be judged, the rules were switched around because “it was unfair for one side more so than it was for the other,” as Pollard said.

When writing the new rubric, Sandpoint High’s leaders kept all the same categories but instead of having subcategories, there is a maximum amount of points that could be awarded per competition. The judges were asked to elaborate on any deductions made from this maximum amount. This made scoring each competition much more open for interpretation between judges in hope for more accurate scores.