[ot-caption title=”Seniors participating in the tug-of-war competition at the Minute-to-Win-it games (via Brittany Shore, Junior).”]

One of the most spirited and exciting events at Pine Crest each year is Homecoming and the many activities that come with it. On Thursday, October 22, Upper School students met in Stacy Gym to participate in the annual “Minute-to-Win-it” games. The games were filled with overwhelming excitement, Panther spirit and much more.

The Minute-to-Win-it games consisted of the Scooter Relay, the Tug-of-War competition, the Three-Legged Race, the Frozen T-shirt contest, the Balloon Stomp, and the Dizzy Bat contest. Teams of students from each of the grades competed in the events to potentially earn Homecoming spirit points for their class.

The first Minute-to-Win-it game was the Scooter Relay. In this game, participants used a scooter to race from the starting line to a cone and then back to pass the scooter on to the next team member. The juniors started off strongly and ended with a solid victory.

Students also competed in the Balloon Stomp, which consisted of students tying a balloon to their ankle and trying to pop the balloons of other students, without getting their balloon popped.  The participants did an amazing job, especially junior Andres Soto who was part of the final three students to remain in the game. However, since the other two remaining students, Eli Lenner and Maggie Pliske, were sophomores, the victory went to the class of 2018.

Finally, each class participated in the classic Tug-of-War competition. In the first rounds, the seniors beat the freshmen and the sophomores defeated the juniors. Then, the juniors claimed third place by winning against the freshmen, and the seniors claimed a first place win by defeating the sophomores in the final round, in a very dramatic come from behind victory.

The three remaining games were also exciting. The Three-Legged race was won by the juniors, the Dizzy Bat contest was won by the sophomores, but nobody won the Frozen T-shirt contest due to the t-shirts being too frozen.  The participants were slamming the icey shirt onto the floor in an attempt to thaw it, but they were overwhelmingly unsuccessful, so the competition was called off.

Overall, the Minute-to-Win-it games were phenomenal and everybody had a lot of fun while participating in the games, winning points for their classes, and cheering for their peers.  As senior Roshni Singh summed it up, “Minute-to-Win-it games were super exciting to watch and just great this year!”