Senior Games
May 31, 2023
From April 6 to 26, 110 seniors competed in MVHS’s first ever Senior Games, a series of challenges that culminated in a free prom ticket for the winner. Senior and Leadership students Itai Lavi and Darpan Singh were inspired to host the games in order to bring the senior class together for the last time.
“We did this to incentivize some camaraderie between our class because we thought that was a bit lacking,” Lavi said. “We were trying to have something exciting for the senior class that hasn’t been done before.”
Lavi and Singh took inspiration from Lynbrook High School’s version of Senior Games but changed some of the challenges to make MVHS’s version unique. Descriptions of each challenge were posted on the Senior Games Instagram account the day before.
The first series of challenges were dress-up tasks, where participants had to wear hats, mismatched shoes, sunglasses and gloves to school. If another player took a picture of someone not wearing all their items outside of class time, that person would be eliminated. Senior Aditya Mishra, a finalist in the games, enjoyed this challenge.
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“[My favorite part] were these challenges that you do every single day, especially in the first week where you were just wearing those items,” Mishra said. “One of the days you had to wear four of the items, [which] became a really cool challenge. Seeing everybody walk around and trying to get people out was also really fun.”
In the next series of challenges, players were assigned to a group and tasked with taking a selfie together at various locations. Lavi and Singh assigned these groups randomly, allowing players to interact with people they might not have known. Groups that did not submit their selfie in time were eliminated.
“That was actually my favorite part, seeing all the different groups together smiling,” Lavi said. “These are people that for the most part we didn’t think were friends with each other. [This challenge] really brought people together.”
Finally, the last 14 contenders competed in the finale game of Simon Says on April 26. Mishra was one of the first people to be eliminated after raising his hands by accident.
“I was trying pretty hard and I really wanted to win,” Mishra said. “I was competing with all my friends and I was telling them I’d win a lot. I was pretty disappointed. I think Simon Says is an interesting way to go, [but] I thought [the finale game] should have been more creative because the rest of the challenges were a lot cooler.”
Senior Stephanie Zhao, the final winner of the Senior Games, agreed that the finale game was underwhelming. Nevertheless, Zhao felt proud after ultimately winning the grand prize.
“I honestly expected the finale to be a lot more difficult, so I didn’t think I was gonna win. But after there were five people [left], I thought that I had a chance,” Zhao said. “I felt very ecstatic and happy. It’s kind of weird to see our class unified in something because they’re usually not.”
Overall, Lavi says MVHS’s first Senior Games was a success due to the positive reactions he saw from fellow seniors participating in the game. However, he says that they could have planned the challenges more in advance, as some of the challenge updates on Instagram were not posted in time.
“We were very grateful that people actually ended up enjoying the games,” Lavi said. “Obviously, there were some bumps in the road, like managing when to post and coming up with different games, but we think for most of us this first ever attempt was actually really successful.”