On September 29th, a Homecoming King will be crowned for the first time in South’s history during halftime at the Homecoming game.

Crowning a Homecoming Queen has been a tradition at Grosse Pointe South for decades. However, this year our Student Association decided to change it up.  In the past two weeks, the Seniors nominated Simon Chen, Harry Susalla, Jackson Wujek, Karl Krieger, and Mathieu Fikany to be on the first ever Homecoming King ballot.

The idea of a Homecoming King has been in the works for a few years, but began to pick up steam in the last year according to co-chair of Student Associations Nomination committee Julia Turnbull ’18 c.

“Last Spring, it started with Daniel Kuhnlein and I,” Turnbull said. “We began to make movements to get a king approved and have everyone on SA on board with it..We also talked to people outside of SA and a lot of people seemed into the idea.”

The addition of a king was something that was agreed upon by the Student Association before they reached out to whole student body, according to the SA faculty advisor, Ms. Distelrath.

“Last year as part of our nominations and voting process for the queen we included a question of whether people would be interested in having a Homecoming King,” Distelrath said.  “More than half of the student population voted yes– that they wanted to see that– so we decided to pursue that this year.”

According to Turnbull, one of the biggest concerns with the implementation of the King is the extra workload that Student Association will have to take on with the extra ballots.

“The only way we would be able to add in a King would be to make it easier to vote… that led to online voting,” Turnbull said. “We began online voting with google forms and then it was easier to count the ballots, so we had time to include a Homecoming King.”

The fact that there was a queen but not a king seemed outdated to Student association VP Julia Rapai, and the addition of a king seemed fitting to create a more inclusive environment at Grosse Pointe South.

“I think there was a feeling throughout SA that we wanted to have a more inclusive nomination process this year so we voted to add a Homecoming King.” Rapai said,.“I’m just excited,;I think we all need to find ways to be more inviting to a bunch of different people so I think this is a small but cool way to do it.”