If you are ever in the Student Activities Center (SAC) on a weekend, you might see a group of students lugging heavy tech equipment around the building. If you’ve ever been to a school dance, on a Choate trip to New Haven, or attended Spring Fest or a movie night, you have seen the products of these hard-working students. This group is actually a club known as SAC Tech Crew, and they’ve been active on campus for more than 25 years.
“When I started here, we didn’t have a mechanism for supporting our own activities,” Mr. Jim Yanelli, Director of Student Activities, said. “There were students that hung around my office. My goal was to make their experience useful. So I starting saying, ‘Hey, could you help me do this?’ Some kids really took to that quickly and actually enjoyed the mechanics of the event preparation and the event clean-up.”
Originally, the group didn’t have much to work with. “We had minimal equipment. Students DJ-ed the dances and provided technical support. It took on a life of its own and got more precise in terms of how kids were trained, what the expectations were, and the perks,” Mr. Yanelli said. “We used to order pizza and stay up late to watch Saturday Night Live.” Now, Mr. Yanelli takes the students to Colony Diner after cleanup.
Although he is the faculty adviser of the club, Mr. Yanelli says he relies on student leaders. “I haven’t done much other than put things in motion. I count on the student leaders to develop their own area of expertise. Daniel Heredia ’19, who is the master of scheduling, lets kids know well in advance what the options are and sends out meeting invitations so kids have reminders on their calendars.”
Heredia, co-president of SAC Tech Crew, described how the system works. “Since I’ve been president of this club,” he said, “I’ve decided to take it in a more template approach. I categorize events based on our needs and the location.”
Events run entirely by the crew, according to Heredia and Mr. Yanelli, take about ninety minutes to set up and another ninety minutes to clean up. Heredia said, “The reason it takes so long is that we have to work around other people in the space. There are a lot of different variables going into the night — for example, if we have food or if we have special guests coming into the space.”
For larger events, like next week’s Last Hurrah, the planning takes weeks, and the setup alone can take an entire day. Heredia said that the the use of outside vendors, as well as the rest of the planning process, can increase the time significantly. “We work with a couple different local businesses in the area. The two big vendors we usually get are New England Sound and Light and Sound Spectrum. We just say what our needs are [and] how we want to set that up: ‘We need to make this sort of space with the seating, we have this amount of people coming — you guys can do the rest.’”
Mr. Yanelli added, “We count on tech crew kids to collect tickets at the door and help with aspects like lighting, sound setup, decorations, and food.” He went on, “For [major dances], the setup process is begun right after lunch, and then we have another shift that starts right after dinner, and then we have a third shift that starts at 11:45 p.m., when the dance is over.”
On any given weekend, the SAC can be expected to host many events. Last weekend, for instance, the club prepared for more than five events. Mr. Yanelli said, “Spring is hectic because there are senior events every Thursday night. Just moving furniture in St. John Hall could be one person’s full-time job.”
Lani Day ’21, another member of SAC Tech Crew, said that she thinks “the spring is the busiest time for the crew just because there’s a lot of senior events that need to be set up. We want to make them good because they’re the last ones the seniors will have.”
The School benefits greatly by having kids who are willing to step in and help set up and clean up events. Mr. Yanelli added, “The kids benefit greatly from having the experience of being part of the team that does something critical for the Student Activities Department.”
Heredia said, “A lot of our kids aren’t tech-oriented at all. I want to allow students an opportunity to learn and explore. I’ve trained tech crew students. We make diagrams and videos that show how that all fits together. We solve a lot of our own problems. At other schools, it would always be deferred to some other company.”
Additionally, Heredia said, “We have approximately twenty-five students on tech crew who are on a rotating schedule to accommodate their own plans for the weekend and to make sure that we balance people’s time and our needs. Nowadays, I’m trying to institute more ways so that more people can get involved. I want to take the load off of Mr. Yanelli [and] make tech crew an autonomous process.”
Day describes her work with the group as “one of those things during my Choate career that has made my weekends brighter and more fun.” The work can be tiring, but Heredia and the crew are energized by, as he put, being “directly responsible for giving 800-plus students a good time.”
