Silly Sacks Seriously Fun Team’s Routine In The Bag For Sports Illustrated, Ferris High Brings Back Its Funky Half-Time Show

Three minutes to showtime, and Nancy Butz faces a crisis.

A silly sack is missing, and a Japanese foreign exchange student is near tears.

Butz is a home economics teacher at Spokane’s Ferris High School, but more importantly this night, she’s the faculty adviser of the school drill team.

The same drill team that has revived its silly sack halftime performance at the request of Sports Illustrated.

Yumiko Kishiro of Kobe, Japan, avoided an earthquake last month by being a foreign exchange student in Spokane. But on this night, she’s rocked anyway.

Kishiro was the last drill team member to reach into Butz’s cardboard boxes of silly sacks, and she grabbed only air.

Butz makes a frantic count. Twenty-nine silly sacks. We had 30. Where is it? Stuck behind the bleachers back at school? In the sewing room?

One minute to halftime.

We’ll have to wing it, Butz says.

Kishiro slinks away.

The Ferris Saxons’ drill team, minus one, dances onto the Spokane Coliseum floor as the “Ghostbusters” theme blares from a large speaker overhead.

It’s halftime Friday during the Ferris girls basketball game with archrival Lewis and Clark - the battle of the South Hill but fought just north of the Spokane River.

Ferris’ finest are wearing bright red swimsuit material called Lycra in the shape of big pillow cases. The girls are completely zipped inside. They can see out, but spectators can’t see in.

Even mom and pop can’t pick out Sissy on the hardwood floor.

Huey Lewis screams about the heart of rock ‘n’ roll while the amoebalike dancers gyrate. Flat on their backs (or is it their stomachs) they pulsate like individual human hearts while in a heart-shaped formation.

Then they pop to their feet.

A 20-month-old boy in the middle seats freaks out and runs for cover. He’s seen his first ghost.

The Ferris drill team looks like 29 blood corpuscles trying to jump out of the petri dish and into the microscope.

Its routine is so cutting-edge, Sports Illustrated is intrigued.

The silly sacks routine debuted during 1991’s Rubber Chicken game with Lewis and Clark.

Butz had sewed one of the red gunny sacks and modeled it for her husband, Craig. He thought it was cool.

Many people didn’t. Staid Spokane sat in the stands on its collective hands.

Undeterred, Butz took the show on the road and tried again at the state basketball tournament in Seattle.

The reviews came in: “dazzling,” “stunning,” “brought the house down.”

Ten-thousand high school basketball fans went bonkers. The Seattle Times and Post-Intelligencer and some TV stations took notice.

“They just had that electric feeling,” says Spokane Coliseum public address announcer Pete Townsend, a University High counselor.

“They got a standing ovation. This was a high school drill team. You just don’t see that.”

Nearly 300 miles east, Spokane hadn’t gotten it.

“It’s so conservative here. In Seattle, it was `Wow!”’ the 34-year-old Butz says.

“God, I hope they like it this time,” she says before the performance.

Her girls are nervous even though they had just given each other soothing head massages. About 1,000 people are in the stands.

This Ferris drill team has never done the silly sacks routine in public.

The girls aren’t even sure they like it.

After all, during last month’s Rubber Chicken game with Lewis and Clark, the Ferris dancers donned tuxedos and chickens in buckets while Harry Connick Jr. crooned in the background. The crowd roared.

Now this.

The dancers are forced to wiggle into red bags that impede breathing and hide their smiles. One amoeba, straining to see through the sack, says before taking the floor, “It’s like putting on somebody else’s prescription glasses.”

The show is flawless, synchronized to perfection.

“Did you see ‘em shaking their butts?” Butz says after the first Friday night performance. “I never know what they’re going to do. I just tell them to keep it clean.”

Show No. 2. - halftime of the boys’ game - was 90 minutes away. About 2,000 people would be watching.

Butz drove nearly four miles to Ferris High School to search for the missing silly sack.

She was determined to get Yumiko Kishiro in the game.

“I don’t know what happened,” Butz says. “Somebody must have stolen that sack.”

Ferris boys’ basketball coach Wayne Gilman won a state title last year. Occasionally, he’s referred to as the coach of the school with the really great drill team.

Even opposing players, drill teams and parents watch.

“What’s typical of Nancy Butz and the girls is creativity and innovation,” Ferris Principal Jon Bentz says. “This is stand-alone. Nothing like it. We as a community can be very proud of this.”

Butz arrives back at the Coliseum after ransacking Ferris High School and not finding the missing bag. It bolsters her theft theory.

Several girls volunteer to drop out of the routine so Yumiko Kishiro can have her day in the spotlight.

But two minutes to halftime, Kishiro is missing.

“She must have gone home,” Butz says, hanging her head.

The second halftime show turns into a competition.

Lewis and Clark’s drill team is not too shabby either. In fact, it’s ranked the state’s best precision pompon squad.

The LC girls gather on the sideline to watch the amoebas perform first.

“Very creative. Good illusions. More free-form than ours,” says LC drill team member Amy Budge.