HAHS Hangman Club Sparks Interests

Hangman is a simple game that many people have fun playing. The rules are simple. All you do is select one person to go to the board and write dashes for each letter of the word they chose. Each of the participants are to guess the words and each letter that is not in the word, gets written on the side. After the letter is written on the side, you begin drawing a stick figure for each wrong letter.

Mrs. Geske’s homeroom is one of the only homerooms to have their own group that could be considered a class club. Every club day B, the remaining students who do not have a club to go to play several games of hangman. Mason Henne and Patrick Hanlon are the “managers” of the club and get very involved in the games. Mason says that they “like to keep the club on the down low”, meaning they like to keep quiet about it, simply so that they do not have to tell people that they cannot join, due to this being Mrs. Geske’s homeroom only.

Meredith Haas is a participant of the club and states that the club is “exclusive, only for homeroom 11D.” The club even has their own Instagram @hahshangmanclub to spread word of the club updates. Themes of each game revolve around the closest holiday/season. The one to start the “club meetings” is usually Mason or Patrick.

Each of the participants look forward to club day B just to get their day started on a positive and fun note. Though the group may seem fun, they also take it very seriously when a person does not follow their rules. Meredith had explained to me that she is on “probation, for not following the rules of the club.” I thought everyone was joking about probation, but as I watched Meredith go to the board for her turns, I began to understand why she was on probation.

I sat in on one of these meetings and saw that this club is pretty competitive. Meredith did an eight-letter sentence that fired the rest of the group up. The final answer was “Getting stuck in a blizzard at Julie’s house” and the other members were not happy with that. They all started arguing among each other and going after her for doing this sentence because “it did not fit into the criteria of the Christmas season.” The students in the small group take the game very seriously and still manage to make it fun.

Overall, the idea of a hangman club is to simply have fun and enjoy themselves before the day starts. The “club” is really just something small that the homeroom of 11D does to pass time during the extra period they have on the given day.