You see the massive, colorful and detailed homecoming floats parading around the track during halftime at the homecoming football game, but after that, they seem to disappear. The bases, the wood, the thousands of pomps — all gone. While most students slept in on the Saturday morning of Homecoming, over 60 students were participating in the lesser known tradition of Homecoming: float deconstruction.

At 9 a.m.on Saturday morning, these students showed up to the Rocklin High School blacktop where all four classes’ floats were stationed. Using hammers, wrenches and even baseball bats, the kids (with the supervision of ample adults), did everything they could to demolish the floats. 

For class officers in particular, the experience is very cathartic. The process of planning, designing, and building a float is a long operation that comes with high stress, so the ability to beat the crap out of their class’s floats can be, unsurprisingly, stress relieving. 

Senior Class Officer Jordan Winter is someone who can definitely speak to this. He said that destroying the float he worked so hard on was “definitely satisfying.”

The deconstruction process took around two hours, and consisted of ripping the chicken wire, taking apart the bases and storing them in the ASB storage shed. And according to Jordan, “It’s definitely a little labor intensive.”

“It definitely made it a little sentimental, just knowing that this is the last time I’m gonna get to do this. It definitely played on my mind the whole time,” Jordan said.

The float deconstruction generally means the end of Homecoming festivities, and this year it was the ending scene to “Homecoming to a Theater Near You.”