At the start of brunch, Assistant principal Mike White made the announcement: The Gobble Games had officially begun. A turkey ran across the academic court, leaving with him a wake of mild confusion and then an entire horde of students chasing after him. On Nov. 22, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, baked potato, green bean and a turkey sprinted across school during brunch and lunch with tokens in their hands, marking the first ever MVHS Gobble Games.
The event was hosted by Leadership commission Student Life — the goal was to catch at least three food items in order to get tokens from them. Three tokens could be traded in for a slice of pumpkin pie in the academic court, where Leadership hurried to keep up with the crowd forming around their tables.
While it was first announced through a Schoolloop email, the first time many students heard of the Gobble Games was through the announcement during brunch. Student life commissioner senior Henry Wang, who dressed up as the turkey this year, had people questioning his costume the morning before the games.
“People already saw me in my costume and were asking me about this thing, and right as [White] made the announcement everyone turned to look at me and I just ran straight out of the room.” Wang said, “Everyone started chasing me, and as they did I thought ‘this is going to be so much fun.’”
The entire event started out as a joke at first. According to Student Life Commissioner sophomore Jessica Ji, Student Life wanted to plan an event for the students before Thanksgiving Break, so while they were brainstorming ideas, Wang joked that they should release a live turkey in the school, like they do in the White House.
“Then I said, ‘hey, why don’t we have someone dressed as a turkey instead?’” Ji said, “And it began from there. Originally we were only going to have one turkey running around the school today, but then we decided to add pumpkin pie, mashed potatoes, baked potatoes and cranberry sauce.”
“There was an intense rock paper scissors match over who got to be the turkey.” Student Life Commissioner junior Samantha Millar said.
Students did “crazy things,” according to Millar, to catch the dinner items. Millar had people tackling and grabbing onto her sweater. Ji had people do pushups and give hugs and compliments to strangers.
The exhausting chase was not all these leadership members had to face. Ji reflected on how people treated her throughout the day dressed up as a pumpkin pie.
“It made me feel like an actual object, because people would run up to me and scream ‘ticket,’” Ji said. “Or like earlier in the morning I was wearing a jacket and people were pulling on my jacket and i was like ‘no just let me go i just want to be a food item.’”
According to Millar, Student Life was unsure of the reception they’d get; most of them sure that they’d get maybe minimal participation or a couple interested people. What they didn’t anticipate was that they’d run out of tokens within the first ten minutes of brunch, or that they would have to buy more pumpkin pie after brunch during their leadership period.
“Honestly we were very concerned about it working out because it is a little kooky,” Millar said. “So we weren’t sure how people would respond. But we are so thrilled with how people have taken it. I’ve been chased, I’ve been tackled, which sounds like a bad thing, but it isn’t — it is probably the best part of today.”
Seniors Amritha Anand and Tejal Kolte were hesitant to participate in the Gobble Games at first, but once they saw Millar dressed as cranberry run by they couldn’t help but also chase after her.
“Everyone was helping each other out like as we were running I yelled “oh did he go up here?” and two random people I didn’t know were like “yeah he went that way!’” Kolte said.
But, there’s a positive side to struggle of the chase: Anand found it a great way to exercise, especially before Thanksgiving holidays.
“It feels rewarding because I’m a lazy person, so it was great running and finally being able to catch up and get the token and get pie.” Anand said.
Student life hopes to cement Gobble Games into MVHS tradition. Millar wanted to better publicize the event and definitely add safe zones for the food items, as sometimes the rules were unclear. Ji hoped to add more food items and make the pie table less hectic, as many people rushed to collect their reward. Wang thought it would be fun to add decoy food items, so that once people finally caught up to them they would have to find and chase after the real food items with the real tokens instead.
“We hope for this to be a tradition at MVHS,” Millar said. “We came up with a couple new ideas for holiday week so hopefully those play out as well as this one did, and based on the reaction for this event we hope to have more like this.”
