Seniors Take the (Class) Olympic Trophy

The energy at Old Rochester Regional High School on Friday, March 4, was palpable as students got excited for the Class Olympics held at a pep rally during the last hour and a half of the school day, in which students from every grade level competed in a series of games to get into the spirit for the basketball game held Saturday, March 5.

In order to allow time for the pep rally at the end of the day, the first three classes were shortened from their usual 90 minutes to about 60. The final class remained the same length in order to keep the lunch schedules running smoothly. Students were dismissed to the gym by grade at the end of the final class.

The first event to kick off the rally was a version of ‘Pictionary,’ in which contestants were given 30 seconds to draw a given object to the best of their ability. The panel of judges for the game included three teachers: Geoffrey White, Seth Bushnell, and Diane Palombo. The game began with a simple, school-spirited drawing: the bulldog. The talented freshmen took the victory for the first round. The topic for round two: draw your favorite ORR teacher, which the seniors took home for the win with an artful rendition of Mr. White. The final round required contestants to draw seniors Evan and Will Santos, affectionately referred to as ‘The Santi Twins,’ which the seniors won again, making them the champions for the Pictionary game.

Next came the three-point contest, which included one person from each grade. They were given 30 seconds to score as many three-point basketball shots as possible, with one other member of their grade catching the rebounds. The juniors and seniors tied for third-place with two baskets each, the freshmen came in second with three baskets, and sophomore Jason Gamache was the champion with a total of eight baskets.

The third event was the notoriously messy egg toss, in which students participated in pairs passing a raw egg back and forth from increasingly larger distances across the gym. When the egg cracked, the team was disqualified. After about a minute of stress-filled excitement, not to mention many broken eggs and a yolk-spattered floor, it was down to the final three. In the end, the sophomores came in third, the seniors in second, and juniors Jacob Caffarella and Tyler Moreau won the event.

Then there was the ever-popular donut eating contest, which is exactly as the name implies – contestants were required to eat a donut tied to a string as quickly as possible without using their hands. The judging for this became a little tricky, as the donuts began to fall off the strings as more of it was eaten. The students carried on, however, with a win from senior Nils Sünderhauf, an exchange student from Germany. In second came Amaya Bell for the freshmen, and in third was sophomore Michael Sivvianakis.

A rather cut-throat round of musical chairs was up next on the list of events. Two contestants from each grade were selected, and music was played through the gym’s sound system. Students were eliminated one by one as chairs were removed, until it was down to the final three: juniors Connor Farney and Ariane Dias and sophomore Ali Hulsebosch. Farney came in third, which left Dias and Hulsebosch to compete (literally duke it out with each other) to be the champion of musical chairs. When all was said and done, Dias scored the points for the juniors.

The second-to-last event was a relay with a twist. Six students from each grade volunteered to participate in one of the three parts that comprised the race. First, one student pushed another on a scooter board across the gym until they tagged another set of students who had to wheelbarrow-walk across the gym to yet another pair of students who had to run back and forth across the gym with their legs tied together (a three-legged race).

As the race began, it appeared the seniors had the event in the bag, as they had quite the lead in both the scooter and wheelbarrow parts of the race. In the three-legged dash, the junior team caught up to, and then surpassed, the senior runners. The lead was then passed back over to the seniors when the junior team took a tragic fall that left them behind the seniors for the rest of the race, sacrificing the victory of that event to the senior class. The juniors managed to pull in second place, and the freshmen were on the board in third.

And finally came the most anticipated event of the rally: the tug of war. Eight students from each grade participated, and the war worked championship-style. The first pairing was the freshmen versus the juniors, which yielded the juniors as the victors. Next up was the seniors versus the sophomores, in which the seniors successfully defeated the sophomores and moved on in a head-to-head battle with the juniors.

The seniors vs. juniors tug-of-war match was pretty evenly matched. The rope even remained in the same spot for quite some time. In the end, however, the juniors were able to channel their inner strength and win the “war.”

When all was said and done, the points were tallied and the winners were announced. In fourth place came the freshmen, followed by the sophomores in third place, and the juniors ended up in second. The seniors won the Class Olympics and took home the prize of $100 to put in the class bank account, a trophy, and an ice cream social.

The rally ended about 20 minutes ahead of schedule, so students were released back to their previous class until the end of the school day.

By Sienna Wurl

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