Posted with permission from Sunny Hills High School’s The Accolade.
On Thursday, Aug. 6, OC Student Sections (OCSS) founder and CEO Chris Holt and COO Jered Baloloy announced that the organization is shutting down after seven years of operation through a post on the OCSS Instagram page.
“From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for believing in us and allowing us to be part of your story,” Holt and Baloloy said in the post’s description.
Thank-you’s from Associated Student Body (ASB) accounts, students and parents flooded the comment section of the post.
OC Student Section’s closure was announced on Thursday, Aug. 6, on the OC Student Sections Instagram. (Image courtesy of Natalie Hong)
According to its website, OCSS was a student-run organization launched in 2019 dedicated to spotlighting various Orange County [OC] high school student sections, like Sunny Hills High School, primarily through social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, in order to “unite schools with their communities under a common interest: high school sporting events.”
After recently graduating college and beginning full-time marketing jobs, the two executive officers decided that ultimately, OCSS was no longer something that the two could financially support, the former COO said.
“We were self-funding OC Student Sections pretty much throughout the entirety of our college years,” said Baloloy, who, along with Holt, worked side jobs during college to support the organization. “Yeah, we got donations here and there, but probably 90% of the organization was funded by our own dollars.”
He said there were talks about handing off the organization to other companies, however, none of the deals were finalized because of conflicting priorities for OCSS’s future.
“We realized that their goals, at least in terms of taking over the organization, were to profit off of people, and the whole point of OCSS was not to make a profit,” Baloloy said. “We didn’t want people taking over this organization where their only goal was to make money out of people and launch all these products and try to kind of just pull money out of people’s pockets.”
For confidentiality reasons, Baloloy said he could not say which specific companies that OCSS was in communication with.
TRACING ITS ROOTS
In 2019, then-San Clemente High School student Holt founded the organization for a simple purpose: to celebrate the students in the stands as much as the athletes on the field.
“It wasn’t as big as it was today, I mean it was probably only 20 schools, maybe max throughout that year,” Baloloy said. “Then in 2022, I think the most that we ever hit was 72 schools.”
Baloloy said the organization briefly halted operations during the COVID-19 pandemic because of quarantine restrictions. OCSS then reopened in the 2021-2022 school year — which was when he joined the staff as an operations manager during his senior year at Yorba Linda High School. After graduating, he transitioned into the role of COO.
In July 2024, Baloloy and Holt created the Spectator Sphere Corporation, a non-profit meant to serve as the parent organization of OCSS and Los Angeles Student Sections [LASS]. However, the former COO said that when they handed the LA branch to a set of LA-based students, LASS went dormant after about a year.
Baloloy said he and Holt founded the Spectator Sphere Corporation to expand OCSS to regions like San Diego and the Inland Empire.
“We realized that having to create separate non-profits for every single entity was going to be a struggle, so that’s why we created Spectator Sphere,” he said. “We could have a parent company for all these other branches that were starting, and it was just going to make it easier from at least a legality standpoint to do that.”
However, because Baloloy and Holt were unable to support the parent company financially, the Spectator Sphere Corporation shut down about a year after it was created, the former COO said.
“There’s a lot of expenses, a lot of costs that I think people did not realize with OCSS,” Baloloy said. “When you factor in the overall expenses for the student staff, when you factor in the expenses for paying for the trophy for student section of the year, when you factor in in paying for the banners, when you factor in paying for all of the branding that goes on all of our assets, it becomes a cost where it’s not realistic.”
THE NUMBERS DON’T LIE
OCSS had over 80 schools participating in their competitions, Baloloy said, including Sunny Hills.
Throughout the school year, OCSS posted weekly student section coverage on Instagram while also reposting content from schools that promoted upcoming sporting events or recapped past games.
The organization received sponsorships from brands like Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers, Chick-fil-A and The Student Section Report, garnered approximately 71,100 likes from its TikTok page and accumulated over 22,000 followers across its Instagram and TikTok accounts as of Sunday, Aug. 16.
From Aug. 2022 to Aug. 2026, the OCSS Instagram account generated over 67 million impressions (the number of times a post or story was on screen, according to help.instagram.com), about 1.3 million profile visits, 1.9 million interactions and over 1 million likes, Baloloy said. The organization was also featured on season 2, episode 4 of the official CIF-SS podcast, which was posted on YouTube in Nov. 2025.
Using images from various student sections, OCSS hosted polls via Instagram Stories for titles like People’s Choice Student Section of the Week, Season and Year.
They also ran competitions for the chance to win Team Choice Student Section of the Week and Challenge of the Week winner.
Sunny Hills first partnered with OCSS in the 2022-2023 school year, ASB adviser David Fenstermaker said. From then on, Lancer Nation continued to enter in OCSS competitions to try to win the “Battle of OC.”
Notable Lancer Nation rankings include fourth place for People’s Choice Student Section of the 2024 Winter Season, 14th for People’s Choice Student Section of the 2026 Winter Season and multiple People’s Choice Student Section of the Week titles.
FINAL PLAY, LASTING LEGACY
OCSS employed a staff of high school student volunteers who assisted in running operations and attended select sporting events upon request to create promotional content, according to its website.
Sunny Hills Class of 2026 alumnus, Jaden Shim, who served as a social media manager and Spirit Coordinator on the 2025-2026 OCSS staff, said Holt and Baloloy informed staff of OCSS’s shutdown at the beginning of the 2025-2026 school year before announcing it publicly on Aug. 6.
“The founders told us that this would most likely be the last year of OCSS,” Shim said. “So, I already kind of knew of it, but before I actually heard it from those two, I never thought it would have ended so abruptly.”
Nevertheless, Shim said he is disappointed over the organization’s closure.
“It was definitely shocking — and also sad — because so many good memories came out of OCSS and so many friendships were made,” he said.
ASB athletics co-commissioner senior Maya Orton, who is responsible for planning and organizing student sections for athletic events, discovered the news while attending the Orange County Leadership Association Leadership Conference with ASB at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
“I was really sad because we always had a need to be the best OC student section,” Orton said. “We would make sure to repost the voting when polls came out to make sure everyone from our school would vote so we can win.”
Fenstermaker noted that after Sunny Hills began to enter in OCSS contests, ASB began to focus more on capturing videos and pictures at student sections to upload on social media.
“I think those ‘viral’ moments were not necessarily something that we were focused on beforehand that we were afterward,” he said. “I think on-trend themes were probably more emphasized [after Sunny Hills partnered with OCSS].”
The adviser additionally said that these contests fueled friendly competition between schools that ultimately helped increase individual student participation and spirit at sporting events.
“I think that it encouraged us because it’s a healthy competition; when you see someone else’s school, [you will think] ‘I want to top that’ or ‘I want to match that’ or ‘I want to emulate that,’” Fenstermaker said. “You have these opportunities to be exposed to these different groups and then you can sort of measure yourself against those groups and try to get better.”
Orton said she agreed that the “Battle of OC” intensified the spirit and participation within Lancer Nation.
“We had so many people at FNLs [Friday Night Lights], and there would always be so much participation in our chants and themes,” she said. “OCSS would make everybody want to show that their school was the best school.
“I remember one of the biggest games was our rival game against Troy two years ago; I think everyone there was very spirited not only because it was a game against our rival school, but also because we wanted to be the better student section.”
Junior Eden Buckley also said that the content featured on OCSS’s social media platforms encouraged her to show more school spirit at sporting events.
“I feel like the edits on Instagram were very cool and made me want to participate and dress up,” Buckley said. “[I remember one] from the neon football game last year.”
However, because of OCSS’s closure, Orton said she is concerned for Lancer Nation’s future as one of OC’s best student sections.
“I’m a little worried that we might not have as much participation, but I’m hoping people will still go to the games,” she said. “I think that because of this competition being gone now, people won’t care as much to go all out or even show up to games.”
In response, ASB members have begun to discuss various ways to fill the advertising gap that the OCSS’s shutdown is leaving behind.
“We were thinking about posting [on social media] earlier, maybe putting posters around school so people without social media could see too,” Orton said. “Hopefully in the future we can create something similar [to OCSS] to still have competition between schools.”
KEEPING THE SPIRIT ALIVE
Fenstermaker said that student sections are particularly valuable for the high school experience.
“I think part of being at a regular high school is being part of a community — of cheering your friends on, and then knowing that when you have your own event, that they’ll be there to cheer you on,” he said. “I think those student sections give you a chance to be a part of something, to lose yourself with a group of people just to have fun on a Friday night.”
Yet, without the presence of OCSS, Shim said he predicts some schools may lose the connections built over the past few years.
“OCSS served almost as a glue to all the high schools, as a way to kind of compete with each other but also have fun with each other,” Shim said. “Unless you’re in the same league or something like that, schools who aren’t in the same league have almost zero way of being connected to each other.”
Buckley, however, said she has a more optimistic view and remains confident in the Lancers’ school pride.
“I feel like our school spirit wasn’t just because of their company,” Buckley said. “We have a lot of school spirit, so I feel like we’ll do fine.”
With or without OCSS, Fenstermaker said ASB will continue to urge students to show up, show out and bring their energy to support SH athletes.
“I suppose we won’t have the weekend voting; those posts will be gone,” Fenstermaker said. “But in terms of what we do on Friday night, and the way we celebrate being at that game and encouraging people to go to games, that won’t change.”
