Students attending the Homecoming parade will be able to see the Owatonna High School Homecoming floats. Over September 26-27, students and the OHS Homecoming Committee put in endless hours of hard work on floats in preparation for the parade. Building the floats was quite costly. Each club and team received a $250 budget from local business sponsorships to help create their floats. The parade will be held in downtown Owatonna and will begin at 1:30 p.m. Floats are themed around the athletics and clubs at OHS and will have the athletes as well as the club members aboard them. There are 17 floats in the parade.

Themes for the floats were chosen by the students. Senior captain of Girls Cross Country Zoe Kienholz said, “We are cross country, but we didn’t want to do ‘trample’ just cause it was already taken so we thought of ‘Trash the Trojans’.” About twenty people helped build the Girls Cross Country float, and it took them under two hours to complete it. When asked about her favorite part of the Girls Cross Country float, Kienholz said, “I really liked our metal garbage can. It kind of added character.”

Another float in the parade is the OHS Student Council float. Senior council member Rebecca Sedivy said, “On our Student Council float we built a car to go with the Homecoming ‘road trip’ theme which is pretty cool.” Sedivy also helped build the Girls Varsity Soccer float which is themed ‘Teepee the Trojans’. This year, it took them only about two hours to complete the floats, which is shorter than the past few years in which took them five to six hours to finish. The Robotics Club of OHS took part in building a Star Wars themed float which centers on the Rebel Alliance. When asked what his favorite part of his club’s float was senior Stephen Bourne said, “The reference to the ‘darkside’ on the very back of the float.” It took the Robotics Club four to five hours to finish building their float with the help of 25 people.

The tradition of the annual Homecoming parade and the celebration of each club and team’s final product will put each team’s hard work on display to be greatly enjoyed and appreciated by the entire community of Owatonna.