After the first four days of Spring Camp, I was able to get insights each evening about how much fun our campers were having through Stephen’s reports and my two brothers’ stories! I was informed about the “no fun”, our paper airplane competitions, and the progression of our campers as chess players. So on my day off from school, I went to work at the camp as THE KING! And no, this is not me being an ego-mainiac. Rather, this was me bringing out the iconic king-hat (see PART 1 and PART 2 of the hat’s origin story) for yet another special occasion.
Although I knew the kids would love the hat, I was caught off guard by the younger campers’ attempts to corner me and steal the hat off my head! I was, however, saved by the bell, as Camp Director Sean Finn hurried the campers outside for the Circle of Doom.
The Circle of Doom is a camp-favorite: the coaches on the outside of the circle try to eliminate the campers inside the circle by throwing dodgeballs at them. However, if a camper gives a ball to a coach, the coach cannot throw that ball at said camper. Even though there could only be one winner per round, all of our campers performed well. As shown in the picture above, however, the same could not be said for some of our coaches!
Our students then went inside for lessons. After teaching our planned lessons for the day, we taught the campers how to play bughouse in preparation for the afternoon’s tournament. Although some of my students struggled to initially understand the game, they were able to grind out wins during the tournament (more on that later!)
But before the tournament, we went back outside to either play dodgeball or go on the playground. Jack Holder was man of the match by some distance during the dodgeball match: each time Sean would go to record that Jack eliminated somebody, he would not be able to finish recording it as Jack would then immediately eliminate somebody else.
Although many campers were frustrated to be on the losing end of Jack’s masterclass, nobody could be frustrated after the “coaches vs campers” match! Because us coaches felt we had an unfair advantage, we sent a junior instructor, Andrew Salnikov, to the campers’ team. As we found out the hard way, sending Andrew was the worst possible decision for our team: he went on to eliminate all of the coaches, including myself on two separate occasions! ***Andrew later admitted that he volunteered to play on the campers’ team so that he could get me out. As the kids chanted, he “checkmated the king!”***
It was then time for lunch, where our players were able to refresh before the bughouse tournament. While they were eating, however, we ran into a problem: we only had 19 participants: an odd number. The solution: have Coach Valerie play!
Spoiler: she went on to have a very, very bad tournament, only winning one round and losing over half of her blitz games! (each round consisted of one bughouse match and two blitz matches, one per person).
Emma Shevelenko was the most watched player as her games would always take the longest to finish. If Emma was overwhelmed by the pressure of having the entire camp watch her games, she would have to ask her father what it is like being the final match to finish at the ICA Open!
With a perfect five wins out of five, Jack Holder and Matthew Kanounov dominated the tournament! They were the example of the perfect team: whenever one would lose a blitz, the other would win. If the team were to lose the bughouse, they would rally to win their individual blitz games.
Although camp was over at this point, the fun was not yet over for our coaches. Arnav Adepu and Andrew Cerami challenged Sean Finn and Alan Stolyarov to a bughouse match. Unfortunately, this was not a close game as our more senior coaches dominated both games! Unfortunately, Arnav can no longer claim to be a “bughouse master”!
And this concludes our Spring Day Camp! Thank you to everyone who attended, whether for one or five days. If you want to see more action photos, feel free to explore our photo gallery or click the “Photos” side bar!
Visitors: 420