Join The Club: How To Get Involved At Central

With a large campus of 2,400+ students, everyone has their own wide variety of interests. Luckily, there’s an equally large amount of clubs and events for those interested. Whether it’s joining a club that fits your interests, volunteering locally, performing your talents in front of the school, playing a game in front of your fellow students, or watching the previously mentioned game, there’s always something going on at Central for you to join.

The clubs and events can be split into three main groups: Sports, Performance, and Interest. Starting with sports, Central has teams in almost every sport, from baseball to football, to swimming and even bowling. The variety of sports also means they often compete during different times of the year. Since the schedule for the sports are always updating, the best way to find when upcoming games are is through the individual teams’ Instagram accounts.

Next up is performance. While they occur less often than sports games, they’re also massive events. The biggest performance of the year is the end-of-year musical, which for this year will be Cinderella. These performances include live singers, costumes, a full orchestra, a crew behind the scenes, and several sets and lights. There are also two other plays put on by the theater department, the 11/12 play in November and the 9/10 play in early 2023. The 11/12 play is announced to be “The Importance of Being Earnest,” with the 9/10 play still unannounced. Alongside theater performances, two other main shows are the Devil’s Cabaret (our school-wide talent show in May) and the Guitar Showcase (a rock concert of sorts in April).

Finally, if bigger events don’t seem to fit your wants, you could also join one of the hundreds of smaller clubs. While there would be too many to name in this article, I’ll spotlight a small handful of them:

• The American Sign Language Club meets twice a month to learn not only how to communicate through sign language, but the history of sign language and deafness overall.
• The Connect Club, through social activities, supports special needs students
• The Echo Club is the school’s yearbook committee. Over the course of the year, they design, take photos, and organize everything happening at Central into the yearbook which we receive at the end of the year
• The HC Gamers Esports Club comes together to form an Esports team that will compete against other teams in New Jersey, as well as more casual gaming.
• Mock Trial is a competition where two schools receive evidence about the same court case. Then, after being assigned a side of the case, they have to build evidence and defenses to go against each other in a mock trial.
• P.U.L.S.E club is our schools’ LGBTQ+/straight alliance club. This club promotes acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community through celebrating queer history and creating a safer environment in our school. They also come together to protest homophobia and transphobia, like Team PYC during their attempt to advocate for removing LGBTQ+ books from the library and in our curriculum.
• The Soldier Support Club raises money to donate to homeless veterans and the family members of veterans.
• Strides Against Stigma raises awareness about mental illness and makes mental illness a more accepted concept.
• S.A.D.D club (or Students Against Destructive Decisions) works with at-risk students in order to make sure students make safe, non-risky decisions
• Third Wave is our school’s gender equality awareness club. Through working with local organizations, they raise awareness of how gender inequality has an impact on the daily lives of women.
• Alongside the already mentioned clubs, we also have clubs for different languages all over the world, such as German, Chinese, French, and Spanish.
• There are also national honors societies for Science, Math, English, and other core subjects.
• If you want to see a list of all the clubs at Central, Click Here. 

Central keeps promoting the idea of wanting to form a community within the school to bring us all together. These clubs, shows, and events are how we can interact with students which otherwise we may have never met. To form friendships with people we might not have known if it wasn’t for that one club, that one show, or that one game. It’s becoming connected to one another through our interests and entertainment that makes us become a community