While students look to dodge their final exams, the school held a dodgeball tournament as a special event for the last month of the school year.
The tournament was hosted by the volleyball program on Wednesday May 18. Students and faculty were free to register with teams of 10 to compete for the championship. The tournament was set up as a double elimination bracket, meaning teams got a second chance to stay in the tournament after their first loss. Throughout the event, teams had so much fun talking trash and competing in front of the sizely crowd that came to watch.
“It was a fun time and we definitely want to keep building and growing it for the campus and student body to enjoy every year,” Coach Megan Liverett, the sponsor of the event said.
A total of 10 teams came out to compete for the tournament; The Alphas and Daniel, Men and James, The Head Hunters, The Neon Nukes, The D3 All-Stars, The Odd Ballers, The Electricians, The Ball Busters, The Ball Catchers, and The Sarm Goblins. Before the event started, all the teams had fun boasting about their confidence.
“I feel really good,” junior Chris Dunn of The Ball Busters said before his first round matchup against The Alphas and Daniel. “The first matchup is gonna be really easy, I mean really easy. That’s a first round exit right there. We’re definitely gonna go all the way, 100%.”
From the beginning of the tournament, The Sarm Goblins, made up primarily of baseball players, seemed like the favorites to everyone in attendance. They breezed through their first couple games before taking a loss midway through the tournament.
“It’s double elimination, and we’re going for the championship,” Sarm Goblins freshman Ben Salazar said. “We’re going game by game and sometimes one’s gonna slip away. When you’re playing for big things, big things happen sometimes.”
The event acted as one of the final events at the school for seniors to participate in before graduation, and teams such as The D3 All-Stars dedicated their efforts to the seniors on the team.
“I think we played good, you know,” Niko Saltchev of The D3 All-Stars said. “We had a lot of [adversity]. We were down a player, we were facing elimination, but I’m proud of how our boys worked. We hustled for every ball, and didn’t complain. This game’s about having fun, not about winning, and we had fun…I have to say to each one of them, the seniors, I’m gonna miss them. I got till next year so I really gotta make a team for next year.”
The final two teams that remained for the championship game were The Sarm Goblins, the baseball boys, as well as The Ball Catchers, dressed in sweatpants and brown shirts. Since The Ball Catchers had yet to lose a game and The Sarm Goblins had lost one prior, The Sarm Goblins had to win two in a row to take home the championship. Tensions were high in the gym as everyone was screaming and cheering for both sides. After The Sarm Goblins took the first game, The Ball Catchers came back in the second game to win the whole tournament.
“There’s not much to think about whenever there’s a lot of adrenaline in your body,” member of the tournament-winning The Ball Catchers, senior Esai Arispe said. “All I can say is we came out on top, we did what we needed to do, and we won.”
All the teams had fun and competed, and the event’s organizers even gave out multiple awards, such as the Electricians winning “Best Dressed” and the Ball Busters winning “Most Spirited”. It turned out to be a successful night to support the volleyball program and just have fun, and The Ball Catchers made a statement by coming out on top.
“To all the doubters, you have to take a chance on an underdog sometimes,” Arispe said.
