By Maria Leonino

    Student Council hosted their annual Dodgeball Tournament last night in the high school gym. Ten teams participated, and all of the proceeds were donated to the Sears Strong Campaign for high school student Justin Sears, who was diagnosed with cancer in December.

    The winning team was awarded with a t-shirt. Winners included Parker Dinger, Colin Sellers, Collin Lang, Declan Ange, Michael Marinaro, Corey Hunt, Alex Cramer and Nathan Hallam.

    Chip Ruggles was the head of the dodgeball committee, and he had been working on the event for about a month. He had help from his committee members Caleb Edmondson, Maddie Merlene, Grace Laber and Julia Csernyik

    “We had a lot of time between after break and now, so we took it slow, did everything we needed to do and made sure everything was in order. We weren’t rushed at all so that helped,” Ruggles said.

    This year was Ruggles’ first time running the tournament, and in order to prepare he followed a list of requirements the people last year made. Overall, he feels pretty good about how the tournament went.

    Edmondson brought up the fact that advertising was at times hard because some kids do not want to pay money to play.

    “The biggest thing was advertising and getting people to sign up. It costs money, and kids don’t want to pay money, but 90% of the proceeds are going towards Sears Strong,” Edmondson said.

    In order to prep for the event, Ruggles and his committee had to get in touch with Drama Club for music, schedule a time for the gym, get the dodgeballs, make flyers and make the bracket, which was a hard task.

    “The roadblocks we had was making the bracket because a lot of teams rush and barely get their rosters in on time, or sometimes even later. We had a day to make the bracket, so that was tough to figure out,” Ruggles said.

    Overall, Ruggles found the tournament and amount of people to sign up a success. The students enjoyed a night of playing dodgeball with their friends for a good cause.