3rd and Final Day of Sports Week!

The 3rd and final day of the first ever Stephens Sports Week has come and gone, but it will not be forgotten. Water, dangling biscuits, and the highly anticipated return of Toddlers vs. Balloons are among some of the highlights of the day. But enough words.

For the first event on this final day, the second and third graders soaked up some fun with the Water Relay, where one teammate filled the bottle for the other to transport back to the start. The second event was very similar, but catered to the kindergartners. After a lot of teacher intervention, there was still a large radius of residual water around the filling station.

Next up, grades three through seven partnered up and tied the knot. No, not to settle down, but to fall down in the Three-Legged Relay.

Bizen and Bibek made a formidable team. They took
the last leg of the three legged race for Yellow House

Some were naturals. Others were Siamese Frankensteins

The little guys had a big day today. Again it was the Lower Kindergartner's turn to take the courtyard, this time to show off their honed hand-eye coordination and deadly accuracy. Their task was to transfer colorful balls from a box to their own team's dust-bin. Naturally the conniving kiddies tried to throw their opponents off by putting balls in the other team's baskets. Tricky little tikes.

The Upper KG class had a modified version of the LKG ball in basket task. They had to toss the balls into the dust bins. Participants reached, stretched, and more than toed the line to get an edge on the other competitors. A shrewd bunch of five year olds...

Elbows! Come on Bibika!

The shot's there. The confidence isn't.

Then it was time for all the little kids to again take the courtyard the Dribbling Relay. They were so good at basketball-style dribbling, the balls never seemed to touch the ground...

Finally it was the big kids' turn again. They took the stage and took to their stocking feet for the Shoe-Tying Relay. I was paying less attention to which house won this one, and more about which shoe-tying technique came out on top; the loop-swoop-pull, or the bunny-ear technique?

The hardest part was trying to find your own shoes

Once securely fashioned to all parts of their school uniform, the big kids battled brains and fast fingers in the Chess and Table Tennis Competitions. However, there is no footage of chess occurring in the classrooms because at the same time in the courtyard, a different strategy game was being strung up for the first, second, and third graders.

Like baby birds or feeding fish, I don't know which, the relayers arrived at the feeding frenzy open mouthed, vying for the dangling crackers and their tickets back to the starting line.

It was a horrifying day to be a cracker

He's so proud he forgot to let go of the rope and run back

While the points from the last three days were being tallied up, the toddlers were given a chance to once and for all prove their dominance over their sworn enemies, balloons. Their task was to bat the balloons in the air to the finish line, but in a dramatic turn, the devious little kids decided to instead humiliate the balloons by playing with them with reckless abandon. Swatting them this way and that, pretending to swat and missing on purpose no doubt to inflict fear upon their inflated foes, the littles ended up the victors by tossing aside the rules and instead tossing around their new, round playthings.

Some didn't bother batting balloons and
authoritatively toted their new toys around

It's been an exciting three days, and though the results are in, I think you know what I'm going to say. I was going to make a talk about there being one big house, a combination of all the houses, but that would make a big brown house and it wasn't a pretty metaphor, so I'll just say this. Every single Stephens student has won today. Everyone had smiles on their faces. Everyone had shouts of encouragement for their friends and their opponents. Everyone had a blast. Everyone got to skip out on three days of classes to play games. Everyone won.

However, for those of you keeping track at home as far points go, Red House and Blue House tied for first, while Green and then Yellow took second and third, respectively. I hope this amazing, first annual tradition of sportsmanship, friendship, and teamwork lives on at Stephens for a long, long time. Way to go Stephens!