Across the wide variety of electives and programs throughout the school, many of them participate in the bigs and littles program, where upperclassmen get assigned a younger student to mentor within their program. Show Choir starts the program at the end of the year, and after the Show Choir decisions have come out, the veterans in Show Choir pull names to get assigned their Little.
“We are there to help guide them through their first year of Show Choir because it is very different than regular Choir,” Senior Lucy Conner said. “I think my experience with this has been really positive because last year my big was one of my friends and she was definitely there to help a lot.”
Conner has been doing choir since sixth grade, however she has been in Show Choir since her junior year. Conner’s Little is Kennadi Taylor, who started doing choir in second grade and started show choir in her senior year. They have known each other since they were in sixth grade, and even though they’re in the same grade, Conner has been doing Show Choir for two years, making her a veteran.
“I feel like this program has impacted me because it’s really helped get me involved in Show Choir in general,” Taylor said. “Because she would include me in things and be like ‘Come on Kennadi, let’s do this, let’s do that’ and just helped me grow closer with everyone.”
The theater department just started doing bigs and littles this year, where students either sign up for the program or talk to the directors about joining. They then share their interests and underclassmen get paired up with upperclassmen. Freshmen Tigh Hall and Senior Riley Montgomery are one of the many Big and Little pairs in theater this year.
“My experience with the Bigs and Littles Program has been really positive. My Little, Tigh is great, he is so much fun to be around and we have a lot of the same interests, I genuinely feel like I’ve gotten to know a lot more of the underclassmen than I did previously,” Montgomery said. “As a senior my plan was to move away and kind of restart my life, but I feel like because of the bigs and littles program I have more of a connection to come back to McNeil.”
Montgomery and her Little, Hall have both been doing theater since sixth grade and met each other doing Addams Family at the beginning of the school year, however, they didn’t get to really know each other until they became each other’s big and little.
“The Bigs and Littles program is great, it’s like you get to have a friend baked into your high school career. I think it’s really great to have that mentor and it just makes it so much easier to navigate this new high school world,” Hall said. “It’s really impacted how I’ve grown into the Mav Theatre company. It feels much more like you belong, so having that right out the gate makes you feel more interconnected with the program as a whole.”
Another program that allows students to have a mentor are the Majestics, who do it the same way that Show Choir does, where the veteran Majestics get paired up with first year members. The way in which it differs is Majestics get assigned people instead of drawing names, and they call it big sister and little sister. Junior Alyna Lee started dancing when she was three years old and did Sapphires her freshmen year before joining Majestics her sophomore year.
“I really like the bigs and littles program, it’s super fun and super nice and it kinda gives you one person that you can go to immediately if you’re not super close to the team yet,” Lee said. ”It’s like you have a special bond with that one person that you can always go to and they’ll always be there to help you.”
