By Joann Kimberly Zerna
The gymnasium does not merely hold the sound; it exhales it. It is a thick, humid symphony of friction—the rhythmic slap-slap of Crocs on the grit-dusted court, the orange blur of a basketball thudding against the grey floor, and the sharp, jagged electricity of chants caught in the rusted steel rafters. To the casual observer peering through the doors of the All-University Intramurals, this is chaos. A fever dream of red shirts and megaphone sirens.
To the College of Mass Communication, it is a lead story.
Since 2023, the CMC have long carried and embraced a label like a stolen crown: the “Dogshow Capital” of Silliman University. To the uninitiated, we are a college of spectacle—an assembly whose identity is measured not by the cold mathematics of a scoreboard, but by the sheer displacement of air. We are the students who trade scripts for sneakers and pens for playful taunts, turning the bleachers into a “theater of the absurd.”
Kapunungan sa mga Mass Communicators (KMC) Governor Luke Timothy Burbano noted that the term eventually took hold within the wider Silliman community. “Since we started dubbing ourselves as ‘dogshow’ back in 2023, I’m happy that it stuck with the Silliman community and became our branding,” he said, noting that the word was never meant to carry any malicious meaning.
On the surface, it is all gidaog-daog and jests. We are loud, we are relentless, and we are unapologetically chaotic. But to stop at the surface is to miss the craft.
Look closer at the way our people move. There is an unmistakable urgency in our presence, a collective grit that goes deeper than a joke. We show up with the same hair-trigger focus we bring to a breaking news deadline, turning every cheer and every synchronized clap into a live production. If the court is our field and the bleachers are our studio, then our presence is the broadcast itself—an intentional, high-energy effort to ensure there is never a moment of “dead air.”
Behind the theatrics lies the heartbeat of the Maskomista: a precision born of discipline. It revealed that our “noise” is never accidental; it is intentional. For every playful barb hurled at a rival, there was a hidden layer of dedication. It is the same rigor we bring to a lead sentence, the same focus we pour into a final edit, and the same resilience required to meet a midnight deadline.
Even beneath the laughter and playful chaos, dedication quietly persists. “MassCom will always retain the ‘dogshow’ energy that we’ve cultured these past few years. Our athletes definitely tried their best to excel in each sport,” Burbano says, adding that every student also exerts effort in supporting the athletes. We moved as one body—athletes, organizers, and cheerers alike—our energy becoming a language of its own. It was a dialect of pride that echoed louder than any referee’s whistle.
The “dogshow” is our armor. It is how we handle the pressure of competition with the grace of a punchline. We are the storytellers who realize that the most powerful narratives aren’t always found in a trophy case, but in the way a community refuses to be eclipsed.
As the dust settles on the court and the sirens fall silent, what remains is not the noise but the meaning behind it. The College of Mass Communication is more than a passing joke about volume and spectacle. We are voices that carry, pens that remember, and a presence that endures. When the final whistle blew and the banners were lowered, the sound may disappear but it lingered in sore throats, in tired legs, in shared laughter on the walk out of the gym.
Beyond the “dogshow” narrative lies the pulse of our college. We are more than the cheers, the laughter, and the energy that fills the gym. We are the shared glances before a game, the quiet determination behind every play, and the stories we carry long after the final whistle. This is who we are—Maskomistas in motion, and our story is still unfolding.
