Diversity Event

"OlympRICs"

On March 23 of this year, some of my friends and I gathered together a team for what promised to be a fun, diverse event called "OlympRICs." The event was hosted by Tyler Patterson and the communications department. The event consisted of 8 teams of 5. There were no limitations on who could be on a team. You could be black, white, girl, boy, disabled, it did not matter. This brings me to my first point that is made by Dennis Carlson when he says that we need to all be "normalized." There needs to be no favorites so that everyone can have the same opportunities. And everyone did have the opportunity to participate. There was a lot of diversity in the events themselves. If you were smart but not too athletic there was a "school trivia" event. If you could eat a lot there was a "banana eating contest." If you could swim there was a "diving competition." And of course there was many more that played to different people's strengths, but the biggest event of all was the volleyball tournament. This was where the real competition started and where the concept of "team" came into play.

Before I explain this, I want to point out that my team was a bunch of wrestlers and wrestlers do not make the best athletes. Now, knowing that, we were facing a couple teams that I would consider to have stacked lineups. The track team was incredibly athletic, as well as the team that they faced in the finals who did not have a kid under the age of 21. As we moved into the tournament and we were waiting for the bracket to be seeded there was an argument about who would get the first seed, and not to be offensive, but it almost seemed like the loudest and most obnoxious team got the first seed. The officials disguised this as spirit points, which clearly other teams had more spirit. This team happened to be all "colored." This is not what Johnson means by using our words to deal with situations. These spirit points ended up catching up to us in the end as we lost third place by 1 spirit point. I felt like diversity was very strong overall here.