More than 8,000 cans were stacked on Hall High School’s cafeteria floor. The cans surrounded big 10 by 10 foot sheets of cardboard laid out on the floor.
Then the stacking began.
Hall and St. Bede students started at 10 a.m. designing their respective school mascots with nothing but canned goods. Each school had about 4,000 cans to work with and designs ready to go. Towering stacks of green beans, corn, chili and tomatoes filled the room.
The competition of who can design the best mascot will benefit the Hall Township Food Pantry, which is set to receive all the goods. The pantry also will receive all the proceeds raised from when the community voted on the crowd favorite at the Hall versus St. Bede boys basketball game Friday night.
10 a.m.
Hall High School — Their specs showed a couple of different designs. One was a giant “H” and another was a red devil.
Hall teacher Kayleen Loch helped the students get their bearings on the wide cardboard space. Then the first cans were put into place.
“My geometry students designed our idea as a class project,” Loch said. The contest had six hours set aside for the students to build, but Loch expected to be done sooner.
“And we’ll probably spend the last hour tweaking it,” she said.
St. Bede Academy — The St. Bede students started off laying down a lot of white cans. Their design for the Bruin consisted mostly of white, green, red and a few black cans.
“We asked for donations and we had to ask for specific cans,” said the Rev. Ron Margherio O.S.B.
The St. Bede students did do some preparatory work before the competition. Margherio said they made sure they could stack the cans eight feet high, which their plans call for.
“Otherwise, we’re just winging it,” he said. “And if it falls we’ll just put a sign up calling it the walls of Jericho.”
11:45 a.m.
St. Bede — “Front … middle … back,” a St. Bede student called out as he was handed stacks of cans three high. The students doing the handing made sure to turn the labels the right way because it mattered. It mattered what color was showing on the outside of the main stack, which was beginning to take the shape of a staggered wall.
Were they running into any problems almost two hours into the competition?
“Tons. Two tons,” Margherio said.
There were few growing pains for the students as the mass of canned food grew higher.
“It’s been difficult getting the cans stable with just cardboard,” Margherio said.
As per the rules, teams were not allowed to alter the cans in any way.
Hall — “Do you need more gravy?” a Hall student asked as she ripped open another package of canned sausage gravy. The gravy came in a black can, a color hall needed a lot of. Hall was more vertical than their competition across the cafeteria. Their stack was 16 cans high, and they were starting to get into a rhythm.
“I’m not sure we’ll have enough cans,” Loch said. “Miscalculations have been a problem and it’s taking some time. But now that we’ve found a rhythm we’ll go faster.”
Pizza arrived shortly thereafter for both teams.
1:30 p.m.
Hall — From far enough back the images were starting to appear in the tall stacks on cans.
“The devil you can see really well,” Loch said.
Hall had four different images on each side of their stack of cans. The team noticed earlier that when taking a picture of the staggered pillars of aluminum, the images appeared clearer.
“We think it’s because it makes it two dimensional,” Loch said.
Cardboard boxes were broken down, cut, and placed into the stack for structural support as the students made their final push towards completion.
St. Bede — “Before I go, are there any other colors you need?” Margherio asked the St. Bede team. The group was short on black cans needed to make up the Bruin bear. Hall offered a few of their extras but they weren’t the right size.
Still, St. Bede’s system seemed to be working well, as their logos began to come into full form. The students had to break out ladders to add more to the top of the stack, which was more than five feet high. With the general layout of their images complete, they only needed to round out the top of the “canstruction” before the voting began at the basketball game.
Brett Herrmann can be reached at (815) 220-6933 or svreporter@newstrib.com. Follow him on Twitter @NT_SpringValley.
