By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff
OCEAN CITY – The year after she was crowned Ocean City High School’s homecoming queen, Gabrielle Davis returned on a fall evening to crown her younger sister, Jasmine, and place the homecoming queen sash on her.
That family legacy continued this year.
On Oct. 23, during halftime of the Red Raiders’ football game with Millville, Davis was there to watch her daughter, Nya Gilchrist, be honored by her classmates as the homecoming queen for the class of 2021.
For Davis, the homecoming tradition has meant a good deal to her. She recalled what it was like in the fall of 2005.
“It was exciting because it was my senior year, and I thought, ‘What can I leave behind as a legacy in Ocean City?’ Becoming homecoming queen, it was like, ‘Wow, wow.’ And to come back the following year to put the crown on my sister’s head was, ‘Did we really just sweep two years in a row?’ Wow.’”
Davis was happy when she found out her sister was going to run for the honor.
“I remember that call I got that she was going to run for homecoming queen,” she said. “I said, ‘Do it. What’s the worst that could happen? Lose?’”
Jasmine Davis didn’t lose, becoming the homecoming queen of the class of 2007.
Flash forward to the fall of 2020 and Gabrielle got some more good news.
Her daughter, Nya, she said, “sent me a text, ‘What do you think about me running for homecoming queen?’ I’m like, ‘Yes!’” Laughing, she added, “‘Can I be your momager (mom-manager). Can I be your campaign manager? Can I come up with your slogan?’ She was like, ‘OK, yeah.’”
She is proud of her daughter.
“She’s a great student, a great athlete, she’s very humble,” Davis said. “She carries herself very well. That’s all we can ask for. We raised her very well, to stay humble and be nice and give love into the world, positive energy. That’s it.”
For her part, Gilchrist said, “I wanted to do it just to do it and now we’re sharing something that’s important to both of us. That’s what’s cool.”
She explained homecoming is like an election.
“You campaign in school, just showing your school spirit and stuff like that, and your peers at school elect you,” Gilchrist said.
School itself is different this fall because of COVID-19 precautions, with the high school on a hybrid schedule with half of the students in school Mondays and Tuesdays, the other half in school Thursdays and Fridays, and all of the students learning from home three days a week.
This homecoming ceremony was different too.
Instead of the members of the homecoming court standing shoulder to shoulder with their escorts on the track by the football field, they all wore masks, were announced one by one and led to stand far apart on the football field itself, keeping members of the homecoming court socially distant. A homecoming game normally would be packed, but those same precautions kept the stands only partially filled. There also wasn’t a shindig afterwards.
“We don’t have the homecoming dance or anything like that, but just being on the field and having limited crowd and limited fans seeing me, it was cool,” Gilchrist said.
“It was exciting,” Davis said about watching her daughter get the crown and sash. “To me it was like family tradition being carried on. Legacy after legacy. I’m proud of her.”
Davis and her husband, Wallace Gilchrist, have a son, James, a freshman at OCHS.
They also have two daughters, Eva, 5, and Kaelyn, 3. That leaves a few years before finding out if the legacy continues.
