The Athletics Department is launching a weekly Spirit Day this Fall to encourage school pride.

Athletics Director Duane Herr said he hopes students will feel a stronger sense of school identity by wearing AACC colors each Friday, starting the first week of school.

Herr said he has noticed the overall sense of school identity has strengthened since the college introduced Swoop the Riverhawk as AACC’s new mascot in the Fall semester of 2015.

“It’s always challenging to go away from your history,” Herr said of the decision to replace the department’s previous branding, the Pioneers.

But, he added, campus and local community adoption of Swoop “has surpassed my wildest dreams.”

“I see ‘AACC’ everywhere,” said Kayla Beasley, a sophomore on the women’s soccer team. “AACC [logo shirts and accessories are] really big.”

“I love school spirit,” Beasley said. “I love … buying all kinds of cool gear like binders, notebooks [and] T-shirts, [and] representing my school when I go out.”

To encourage students and faculty to participate in Spirit Days, AACC Athletics plans to give away Riverhawks gear. Items will include T-shirts and stickers at each team’s first home game this fall, Herr said.

The game schedule is available on the Athletics Department website.

Herr added that the T-shirt cannon, which fires T-shirts into the bleachers at games, is “probably the coolest thing about our department.”