Last school year the Improv Club was approved by principal Jeff Legan; this year they’ve already held their first meeting.

Alex Shaw, the club’s adviser, believes the club will be successful this year because there were a lot of kids at the first meeting willing to make a fool of themselves. She said, “A lot of kids came [and] were willing to make a fool of themselves, and I think you need that. The only thing that worries me is that there is a group of kids who are very close and then there’s another group of kids who are kind of new and a little bit unsure, and my goal is to bring those two together.”

Shaw said the meeting was productive and full of information. She said, “We played multiple warmup games just to get kids comfortable with the club and knowing that you will have to do weird things and that’s okay, and then we went over rules you would need to be successful in improv, talking about teamwork and not trying to be funny but following the story.”

Nick Jones, one of the two student leaders, also believes the club will be successful this year. He said, “I think it will be pretty successful. For the first meeting there was a pretty good turnout, and I’m excited for what the next meeting will look like.”

Tony Kline, the other student leader of the club, has more modest expectations for the club this year. He said, “I think it’s going to be okay for the first year. I believe this year is going to be the weakest year. I say that because we didn’t have that much show up although the people there really got along and had a lot of fun.”

Shaw believes the club could improve from their first meeting by getting kids out of their comfort zones. She said, “I think getting the kids who are comfortable out of their comfort zone by splitting up kids into different groups with other kids because improv won’t work if half the kids are on one page and the other kids want to be but don’t know how, but I don’t think that will be hard to do with the kids in the club.”

Kline believes the club could be improved by having more order during meetings. He said, “We need to be more in sync because it’s chaotic in the room and like an anarchy in there and I think we just need more order in there.”

Jones believes that the club doesn’t think that there isn’t much to be improved based on the first meeting. He said, “I think right now we have a very strong start so far, and I’m sure as the year goes on, any kinks will be worked out.”

Shaw’s favorite activity from the meeting was playing Nuclear Bomb Chicken. She said, “It was fun to see people being really weird and goofy and like chickens, but it was really cool to throw in the twist at the end, where people had to act like a chicken who didn’t know what a bomb is.”