“It would be really fun to start a group here,” said Fin Seely, a Community High senior, of starting the Community High School Pop A Cappella club. Seely transferred to Community halfway through her junior year. She did choir at Skyline and wasn’t very motivated to stay, but she still wanted a group environment to sing in. She didn’t want the club to be a competitive or scary environment.

Seely faced difficulties when trying to start the club. She had to find a room that was free during lunch and had a piano that the group could use. Tracy Anderson, Seely’s forum leader, had a classroom that provided exactly what the club needed. Seely then made posters to raise awareness about the club and held the first meeting a few weeks later.

Between ten and fifteen people came to the first meeting, but after that there were about seven people who came to the meetings regularly. “Some days only three or four people would show up. That would be kind of disheartening and make you feel kind of sad inside,” Seely said. Most of last year’s members rejoined the club this year and there are lots of new members.

“We sing mostly pop music but within pop music, that could be anything,” she said. Now the club meets on Mondays and Wednesdays in the same room as last year. They eat their lunch, warm up, practice and then do a team building activity or sing a song for fun. The members group together to begin rehearsal during lunches. The songs that they sing after rehearsal are usually different than what they are preparing and are sung for fun.

The group is hoping to prepare at least four or five songs this year. “If you arrange a song we’ll try it out,” said Ellie Vandermark, a freshman at CHS.  They have sung “How to Be a Heartbreaker” by Marina and the Diamonds, and now they are working on “Blank Space” by Taylor Swift. The group is preparing “Blank Space” for A Capella-Palooza, a show that all of the Ann Arbor high school’s a capella groups are performing in on Nov. 23.

Julia Babaev, is a freshman who is a part of the choir at Skyline, in addition to the a cappella club. The club is more laid back than choir at Skyline, according to Babaev. “I was kinda nervous but the people here are really nice so I just felt welcomed and not that nervous anymore,” Babaev said.

“It’s more than a club; we see each other in the hallways, we hang out … it’s just a community,” Vandermark said.