You feel the crunch of a crushed soda can and forgotten bag of popcorn under your feet as you’re occasionally nudged by another concert attendee who dances along to the opening act. The artist eventually walks off the stage, and the auditorium around you grows still. Soon the crowd begins to chant, and the energy builds once more. When it reaches its final crest, the headlining artists finally appear on the stage, and the thousands of Echosmith fans erupt in excitement.

   In a raffle hosted yestserday by the student organizations DECA (Distributive Education Clubs of America) and CHS Student Media, freshman Ava Dalton and English teacher Gabe Watson won tickets to experience this at the Gothic Theater, by purchasing a muffin or any kind of Lobo gear at the school store or by purchasing a yearbook. Each winner can take a guest with them to the concert.  Through a partnership with MOXIE ENTERTAINMENT, a promotional company, DECA and Student Media plan to raffle off many more tickets and give students opportunities to attend similar interesting events.  

   “MOXIE is a promotional company, so they help various artists reach out to specific target markets that they have a hard time reaching through traditional media,” English teacher and DECA advisor Amber Hall said. “You guys, as teenagers, are used to having so much noise in your lives that you’re very good at tuning out traditional media and a lot of that doesn’t reach you. That’s part of why they partner with school organizations’  It is to have a way to reach you and have you hear the message.”

   In addition to the raffle for the Echosmith tickets, DECA and Student Media will be giving away Taylor Swift tickets to the student body in the coming weeks, which also came from MOXIE Promotion. Conifer’s student media department is in a partnership with the promotional group as well, receiving similar opportunities for reporters to attend high-class events. Both are receiving other opportunities almost monthly that aren’t strictly concert tickets, such as circus seats and access to special exhibits.

   “[MOXIE] offers free tickets; it’s the same kind of thing they do with radio stations,” Hall said. “We just get to run it at the school level which is fun.”

   All of the profits from the items purchased for the raffle went towards DECA and Yearbook, in order to help the student groups grow and pay for the many expenses that go towards sending students to competition and propelling them further along in the program.

   “Right now we have 18 kids going to internationals which is really expensive, and so [the raffle] will help offset some of those costs,” Hall said. “Then, on April 30, we have our DECA banquet where we do year-end awards, lettering, cords for seniors who have lettered, and that is quite expensive as well. We’re getting the funding going for that and then setting up for opening the school store again next year.”

   As DECA gains more recognition and develops relationships with bigger companies, they are being presented with more opportunities to have raffles and bands like In Real Life come to the school. They have also used some of the opportunities as incentives for their members when there wasn’t enough time to open a school-wide raffle.

   “We received some tickets last semester, but we did not raffle those to the general student population. Those were used as incentive prizes for DECA members to prep to be competitive at their competition. Every DECA member that achieved certain benchmarks in the competition prep was eligible for that raffle,” Hall said. “We only got about a week’s notice which is part of why we didn’t put them out [to the student body], it was just too short a time to get something put together, and we really needed an incentive to get our members to make an effort to be competitive.”

   Two years ago, Student Media received two tickets to Nitro Circus.  Executives with MOXIE reviewed the photo editor’s portfolio and upgraded his tickets to the working media box so that he could arrive early and take photos with journalists from The Denver Post and other publications.  It was an exciting partnership.

   The relationship between DECA, Student Media,  and the promotional company giving them these opportunities is centered around business and how well the students promote an artist or sports team’s tickets. Their continued success with the company shows their ability to go about doing business well, which is the focus of the DECA.

   “It’s a great relationship, and we really love this promotional company. And they love us because we’ve done a good job helping them promote it and getting the word out there which is the win-win. We help you guys know that there’s an opportunity which helps get the word out about their artists, and in exchange we get to give somebody two tickets to have a really good time,” Hall said.