4 Ways to Make Your Pep Rally GLOW

Make Your Students Glow

If you’re a student council leader, class advisor or leadership team member at your school, you know that coming up with new ways to keep student engaged at pep rallies or assemblies can be a challenge, but, we have a solution:

Make your students GLOW!

A blacklight pep rally will be a memory your students won’t forget and will energize your sports teams and student body for the season ahead.

Picture it, glowing students in the stands cheering on the sports teams coming out on the court, dance performances, tons of school spirit. 

Here are our 4 tips to plan the best glow rally ever:

Use The Correct Amount and Type of Blacklights

There is nothing worse than planning a blacklight event and finding that nothing is glowing at the last minute! Always give yourself time to test your equipment and make sure the blacklight is casting enough of a glow on your rally.

A standard midsize school gym is around 120ft x 60ft x 25ft and would likely need 6 LED long-throw blacklights to light up the whole space.

Position the lights in each of the corners of the room, plus in the center at the top of the bleachers, on each side. Use light stands to get the equipment up above students heads, or even better: use the basketball hoop or any existing hardware at the top of the bleachers to attach the lights. The higher they are, pointing down, the better!

Note: Blacklight tubes or fluorescent bars will not give off enough blacklight effect for this type of an event.

Use our blacklight calculator to make sure you’re renting exactly what you need.

Have Students Wear the Correct Color

There are a couple different ways to make your student body glow.

White shirts: A simple solution is to ask students to wear a white shirt on the day of the pep rally. That way, the bleachers will be filled with white and blacklight loves white.

Neon colors by classes: Separate the classes for class spirit competitions (or just want to make your glow rally more colorful) each class could wear a different neon-colored t-shirt.

We’ve found fluorescent yellow, orange, pink and green work best under blacklight. A clever mash-up idea is to give each student a white t-shirt with class year printed or painted in neon.

Utilize the Gym Floor

Neon gaffers tape can be put down on the gym floor to outline the space, write out class years, your school name or draw your mascot.

Neon poster board can be used to make cool floor graphics of sports or student activities that will be introduced during the rally.

Fluorescent post-it notes are another great low cost addition that can make a big impact. Create large art pieces using fluorescent post-its. 

Have huge neon cutouts of a basketball, swimmer, gymnast, etc. taped to the floor. Don’t forget to add neon yellow crowns for Homecoming King and Queen, too!

Think About the Extra WOW!

Everything from the walls to the floor, to the students themselves can be a canvas for blacklight if you plan accordingly. This is where you can have a lot of fun with decorations and accessories! Leadership classes or class officers can design wall murals to hang above each class using glow paint. Get noise-makers that will glow and a huge neon balloon arch on the court. A few of our favorite extras are:

• Glow Make-Up
• Fluorescent Paint
• Glow Sticks
• Glow Necklaces
• Neon Balloons

You may call it a blackout rally, blacklight rally, or glow rally, but whatever you name it, following these 4 steps will make it the student event of the year!