Stevenson School hosted its first Pirate Cup of the year, and despite the slightly gloomy weather, the competition was more than fantastic. The Pirate Cup was previously known as Dorm Olympics but is renamed this year to include day students as well, working towards our goal of creating more connections between day and residential students. Sophomore Adele Lee says, “I really like how they changed the name from Dorm Olympics to Pirate Cup because I think now that day students are included, it is really representing our Stevenson community.”
The Pirate Cup started at two and lasted only a few hours, however, the RAC students and faculties have put enormous effort into the preparation process. They started brainstorming in the summer, pulling inspirations from Instagram reels, other schools’ past activities, etc., and they started planning right away when the school year began. RAC started by limiting competitions to only five. According to Associate Dean of Student and Residential Life Lucy Stockdale, they aimed for activities that would include everyone, have diversity, emphasize teamwork, and help build camaraderie among teams rather than not depending on one specific skill set. Thus, the final list of competitions was knock-out, water balloon toss, Slip ‘N Slide Relay, Triathlon Relay race, and Roll Roll Roll Your Boat. Then, they designed the orders and groupings of the competition, factoring the situations of each dorm in order to make each game as equitable as possible.
After deciding on the competitions, the RAC members worked on a lot of the hands-on tasks, including getting the required supplies and figuring out the people responsible for each activity during the day of the Pirate Cup. The competition proceeded successfully thanks to all the RAC member’s hard work. Both students and faculty members were incredibly energized.
Aside from the five designed activities, two additional ones also contributed to the final score: the dorm flag design and the dorm dance, giving dorms that were not quite prominent in the five active games more leverage to get higher rankings.
The first score that came out was dorm flags. Then came the five activities. For each, the winning side got 500 points while the losing side got 250 points. All points were already out right before the last thing of the day, the dance showcase. Wilson took the lead with 2560 points, followed by Day East with 2020 points. Originally, the dance was going to be worth 500 points max, meaning that it may not be able to alternate the final result by a lot. However, according to RAC member Quinn Tran, they decided to “spike it up” a little, elevating the highest possible amount of points from the dance to 750. This gave dorms that were a bit behind a chance to overthrow first place. In the end, Day West made an epical comeback, and after taking 750 points from the dance, came in 2nd.
Students have quite different feelings about the Pirate Cup and, of course, about the result. Senior Amanda Wang says,
I really enjoyed it because in the last 3 years, I’ve never won a single round, but this year we were able to win it, so this is a really memorable experience for me… Maybe because I am a senior this year, I feel like it is really nostalgic. I usually am not someone who enjoys it because I think it is really time-consuming and there are not many activities that I can do. But this year, I am able to participate in a lot of them.
The Pirate Cup came to a close with a spirited cheering session from each dorm. As expected, the Pirate Cup definitely fostered a deeper sense of community among students and we are all excited for more to come in the school year ahead.
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