News Editors Ira Buch ’25 and Katharine Ellis ’26 take us back to the inaugural Taft Day in 1980.
With assistance from Ms. Rosemary Davis, archivist and records manager, the editors explored back issues of The Record and photos from the archives to illuminate the history of Taft Day traditions.
Hotchkiss has long been involved in rivalries with other prep schools. For nearly a century, the Kent School in Kent, Connecticut, was the school’s main rival.
However, after the school went coed in the fall of 1974, it required a rival that could provide stronger competition for its expanding girls’ sports teams, as Kent’s girl’s athletic program was just beginning to develop.
Taft, located in Watertown, Connecticut, which also became coeducational in the 1970s and had been working to expand the competition for its girls’ athletics, was a more suitable rival.
The rivalry between the two schools was strengthened in 1980 when the school’s athletic director created the first official Taft Day. Since then, Taft Day has expanded to a week-long celebration of school spirit.
Here are some highlights from over 30 years of these celebrations:
1998:
Boys Varsity Soccer defeated Taft 4-0 to cap off an undefeated season. After the game, according to The Record, the Taft coach wrote online, “Too many of our players did not play with the kind of poise you need against a good team, and we paid for the errors.”
1999:
Hotchkiss’ most infamous Taft Day prank occurred when Dan Morosani ’00 and Ian Desai ’00 ran an ad in The Republican-American, a local newspaper, announcing that Taft was for sale. The students ultimately played the purchase inquiries they received on Morosani’s dorm room phone during an all-school meeting.
2007:
During the annual Spirit Week pep rally, members of the Girls Varsity Field Hockey team “beat Tafties” (mannequins dressed in Taft gear) with their sticks.
2008:
On November 8, The Record published a fake issue of Taft’s newspaper, The Papyrus, full of articles and jokes mocking our rival. The articles ranged from “Taft Goes Broke” to “Taft to be Site of Mean Girls 2.”
2009:
Taft’s Red Mob and Hotchkiss’ Blue Mob broke out into a paint balloon fight while watching the Boys Varsity Soccer game.
