Senior assassin is a game where seniors are assigned a target to eliminate with a water gun and videotape the assassination. The more a player advances, the closer they become to the big cash prize at the end of the competition. This has been a tradition here for many years, is loved and talked about by each class of graduating seniors. This year, 76 seniors participated, and there was an app called Splashin that helped create spreadsheets and most of the extra stressful work that organizers would have to take care of otherwise.
Co-organizer of senior assassin Eden Lampi (12) had almost nothing but good things to say about the game.
“I enjoyed it a ton. It was uniting everyone, and mixing up friend groups,” Lampi said.
“I even started hanging out with people that I don’t usually hangout with so we could work together.”
From Lampi’s perspective, the game is supposed to make the last week of senior year a bit more fun and enjoyable.
Co-organizer Anna Rensing (12) also had fun, despite the stress.
“I thought it was hilarious,” Rensing said.
The pressure to eliminate your target while making sure you stay in the competition can be nerve wracking, but overall said to be a really fun experience.
Even though there were many successes in this year’s senior assassin, there were some struggles along the way.
“When we made the rules, we weren’t as clear as we probably should have been,” Rensing said.
There were some difficult calls that had to be made when deciding whether a player was in or out, which caused some overall complication. In the future, clarity of the competition rules will make everything go smoother.
Throughout the competition, many seniors were upset at the fact that buying back into the competition is an option. If a senior was eliminated in the first couple rounds of the competition, they were allowed to pay to continue playing. As the game went on, seniors had to pay more money to get back in.
“I think it’s totally fair, but I can see the equity issues, and understand why people might think it isn’t,” Lampi said.
Another factor to consider was how much lower the winner’s pot would be if people didn’t buy back in. That is one of the reasons the winner was able to get so much money at the end because players want to continue the game by adding more money to the game.
So, if people didn’t buy back into the competition sometimes, winning may be less rewarding because of the smaller amount of prize money earned.
Others think it is unfair because they have worked hard to make it past each round without being eliminated.
At the end of the seven weeks of the tournament, Noah Lopez (12) and Derrick White (12) eliminated each other, and both split the prize money of $1,000 dollars on May 13.
“I’m gonna blow my $500 on whatever I want,” Lopez said.
