EXETER — The opening ceremony was chaotic, the competition was spirited and the winners were humble. It was just like the Olympics, only wackier.
Wyoming Area Catholic School’s WACky Olympics (stylized with the school’s initials) were held Feb. 6 in the school’s gymnasium, rescheduled due to weather from the originally-planned Feb. 2 event during Catholic Schools Week. Ten teams of approximately 17 students each took part in three events — tug-o-war, blindfold free throws and Frisbee toss — to decide the school’s WACky Olympics champion for 2017.
School Principal Eileen Rishcoff said the school’s eighth-graders would “never forgive her” if she canceled WACky Olympics, which she said is “about being leaders in the school and setting an example.”
Teams were formed randomly, with two older students, mostly eighth-graders, acting as co-captains. Max Gilligan and Sarah Murphy co-captained the team called Rosencrushers. Gilligan embodied the WACky Olympics spirit spoke about by his principal.
“I’m just doing this for fun,” Gilligan said. “To have the little kids have fun, that’s the main goal of this.”
His co-captain entered the event with a more competitive mindset.
“I get competitive, though; I want to win,” Murphy said. “It’s like the Super Bowl for our school.”
After physical education and health teacher Jerry Renfer helped organize the kids into their teams in the bleachers against the gym’s back wall and said a few words about the event, the opening ceremonies were complete and the competition began.
The first event was tug-o-war. Teams went to the center of the gym’s basketball court where they each picked up one side of a rope and attempted to drag the flag tied to the middle of the rope to their side of the center court logo.
Seventh-grader Emma Broda’s team, Terrific Toominators, didn’t fare well in the first event but, despite her team’s loss, Broda said tug-o-war was her favorite event.
“I think it’s just fun,” she said.
Due to her co-captain’s absence, Broda was the sole captain of Terrific Toominators. In fact, Broda said her team would’ve fared better if it weren’t for its diminished roster that day. She was confident her team would perform in the next event, blindfold free throws, and she was right; the Toominators scored one basket to tie for second place. Their scorer was Michael Casey, who plays on the school’s boys’ basketball team.
Casey described his strategy going into the free throw event.
“Basically, it was to make sure I was shoulder with the board and I was holding it the right way,” Casey said. “When I shot it, I made sure it went off my fingertips correctly.”
Rosencrushers reigned supreme over the blindfold free throws, though, tying for first with Renfer’s Rebels. The team’s namesake, fourth-grade teacher Jim Renfer, said he let his captains organize everything “so they could learn responsibility.” Eighth-grader and Rebels co-captain Molly Blaskiewicz was confident her team would perform well in the basketball-based challenge.
“We picked kids that were on the basketball team, so they had experience with it,” Blaskiewicz said. “They weren’t just going out there and throwing it.”
Renfer’s Rebels’ other co-captain, seventh-grader Callen McCarroll, was one of the three students the team sent to shoot blindfolded. He said it was his favorite because he has “played basketball for a long time” and is “pretty good at it.”
After the blindfolded free throws competition was over, the teams moved on to the final event: Frisbee toss. Each team was forced to pick a catcher who sat on a folding chair some length away and held what looked to be a net for catching unrealistically large butterflies. The net was used to catch normal-sized Frisbee thrown by the catcher’s teammates.
After the last Frisbee was thrown, Rosencrushers came out on top with 35 points scored over the three events. Second place was a tie between Renfer’s Rebels, Powers’ Processors and Dephillips’ Dunkers with 25.
The scores earned by teams during WACky Olympics were added to existing scores the teams earned during events held throughout Catholic Schools Week, Jan. 29-Feb. 3.
