The Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) hosted a picnic and friendly competition on Sunday Oct. 18 on the football and track fields, to have fun and work as a team. The five flights in attendance consisted of alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, and echo. Each flight worked together in order to win their event and to further expand their bond as a flight.

Lt. Col. Porfirio Muñoz is the Senior Aerospace Science Instructor for the AFJROTC in the school. Lt. Col. Muñoz helped guide the students in case of disagreements and cheered on the flights as they worked together to win.

“Every year in October, we have the cadet field day family picnic,” Lt. Col. Muñoz said.  “We do the field day because health and wellness is part of our ROTC curriculum, and so therefore, fitness on sports day go hand and hand,” Munoz said. “So we invite the family so the students can get to know each other in the other class periods and the families can come see what we do. This is our way of starting of the semester right.”

Each class, or flight, represented their own class period and worked together in order to win the games that they set out for the day. Each game had there defined rules that every flight commander received and read at the beginning of their picnic. The games consisted of relay races, potato sack races, wheelbarrow races, hula hoop races, water balloon tosses, tug of war and dizzy izzy. The students worked together in order to win the number one flight.

Junior Paul Behrend was the flight commander of the echo flight, throughout the day he kept his flight in check and motivated them to keep pushing forward in order to win their next event.

“It took some effort to keep focused but I was able to rely on my cadets’ to motivate themselves.  That’s what it takes to succeed in anything [we] do,” Behrend said.

Each flight was were judged in order to ensure no cheating would occur, and if there was a disagreement the judges would work together to solve their problems. Junior Carlos Alvarado  took photos and helped cheer on the flights during their events.

“We compete against each other and this is basically just for fun but part of is also team building,” Alvarado said. “Were trying to win and if we win we get some free time and first in line for lunch.”

After all the small events, the flights competed in knockout round that narrowed the students down to five to six players. Commands were called out as students rushed to perform them, and if missed, the contestant had to leave the game and cheer on the rest of the students who still played.

At the end of the knockout round, every flight lined up to hear which flight won the picnic. Echo received first place, Bravo received second place, Charlie received third place, Delta received fourth place and Alpha received fifth place. The first place winner got to eat first at the picnic and received Gatorades as their reward for winning and working together as a team.

For Lt. Col. Muñoz, this day is not just about fun and games. The students needed to work together in order to strengthen their flight, and these events help them understand what worked and what did not so that they could reference it throughout the year.

“After we get back in the classroom, we always see a little more team building because they’ve gotten to do something large as a group outside of the classroom with each other and with the other flights. Then we can also use the observations that happened to reinforce what our curriculum is about, leadership,” Lt. Col. Muñoz said. “So we use this as an example to say what went well, what didn’t went well, why and what can we learn from it, and how to be a better leader and a better follower.”