School portraits / Deerfield Day, one November Saturday · 2025
Choate Sends Six Buses of Boars to Deerfield
For Deerfield Day 2025, Choate students rode north in boar onesies and tinsel. Behind the costumes was a sign-up system, a chaperone on every bus and a head count.
On November 8, 2025, Choate Rosemary Hall students arrived at Deerfield Academy for the annual Deerfield Day, a rivalry more than a century old. The Choate News described it: trumpets blaring, chants, blue and gold tinsel braided into hair, face paint, and students proudly parading in boar onesies.
The night before, at the pep rally, came the signature reenactment, in which Choate's boar mascot smashes through a green Deerfield door. One junior called the pep rally one of the most uniting nights of the year.
A boar breaking down a door is a fine tradition, and a very specific one. I would like to know who builds the door.
The paper's reporter went behind the scenes. Deerfield Day alternates home and away, and when it is away, the work is logistics. The athletics office coordinates game times with Deerfield so transportation can be arranged. The student activities office books the buses: six, for fans, with at least one chaperone on each. Every student has to sign up in advance through REACH, the school's system for knowing where everyone is.
The hard part, the director of student activities, Alexandra Long, told the paper, is balance: "making sure we have enough seats for everyone who wants to go, but not so many buses that we're sending them half-full."
The boars bring the spirit. Somebody else brings the clipboard.
As students packed bags and painted faces that night, the paper wrote, they checked their REACH sign-ups one last time. The next morning the buses emptied onto Deerfield's campus to cheers and cowbells, a sea of blue and gold among Deerfield's green.
The day has its tradeoffs. In the same issue, a sophomore wrote about jumping off the bus after an hour-long ride from a tennis match and running to orchestra rehearsal, half an hour late.
The middle one's soccer team travels by parent carpool. I am the driver on away games, which makes me, for one Saturday a month, the bus, the chaperone and the head count. Six boys go in. Six boys must come out.
Last month I counted seven. One was from the other team, who had needed a ride to the parking lot and climbed in. He was very polite about it. I drove him around the lot to his own parents and then counted again. Six.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- Reid Bock ’27: Boars Break Doors on Deerfield Day, November 17, 2025 thechoatenews.choate.edu
- Ha Jin Sung ’28: Equal Fields and Stages, November 17, 2025 thechoatenews.choate.edu
- Sophie Chung ’27: Goodbye to Emails, Hello to Student Notes, November 17, 2025 thechoatenews.choate.edu
- Choate: Student Life choate.edu