Well the Pro-Life Club’s 2012 Fifa ’12 XBOX 360 Tournament got off to a great start on Thursday, December 15, 2011. As soon as the last bell for December Assessments rang, students started reporting to the block of rooms from B112 to B119 to find out when and where they would be showcasing their Fifa skills. Much anticipation, as well as, anxiety encompassed the start of the games. Bryan Stankey ’13 duly noted that he felt like everybody “was very antsy to get the tournament underway.” Overall, forty players participated in the tournament and fifty-two games were played, including a consolation bracket.
The first round set the tone for the tournament with some very intense, emotion-filled games. Trent Marrs ’13, the self-proclaimed “greatest Fifa player in the Dallas metropolis,” started the first round off with a game against his good friend and Fifa rival Steven Spieth ’13. Steven, playing with England, scored a goal with only a minute left in regulation to defeat Trent, who played with Brazil. The downtrodden Trent Marrs was so livid that he actually threw his controller on the ground.
In another first round matchup Porter Huntley ’13 and Chris Steiner ’12 squared off against each other. Steiner narrowly pulled out the victory, but the match definitely had its fair share of trash talking, as most of Steiner’s did.
The most professional game by far was the match between Bryan Stankey ’13 and Quin Carroll ’13 in which Bryan won handily but both players showed their excellent sportsmanship by shaking each other’s hand after the game and exchanging words of praise. Plenty of the losers of the first round entered into the consolation bracket to try to play for second place.
To John Michael Lucido ’14, the consolation bracket was a great addition to the tournament because “it gave the rest of us who might have had a bad game another chance to at least win the second place gift card.”
As the tournament wore on and more and more people were eliminated, things started to cool off a little bit. The experienced began to separate themselves from the amateurs and there weren’t as many heated matches as the players began to concentrate more.
But just as things were quieting down, the trash-talking Chris Steiner could have been heard all the way down the hall yelling at the screen as Sheldon Robbs ’12 embarrassed him with a 7-2 defeat in the semi-final. In the final, Robbs took on Thomas Parides ’14 but Parides was no match for the exceptional Robbs, who took home the fifty dollar gift certificate to Best Buy.
After Parides lost to Robbs, he had to play Aviel Samuel ’15, the champion of the consolation bracket, to decide who would get second place. Aviel ended up beating the obviously worn out Parides and walked away with a twenty-five dollar gift card to Best Buy.
Overall the tournament was a great success as a fundraising event for the Pro-Life Club’s trip to Washington, D.C. But Jordan Tobolka ’13 also wanted to remind readers that “this is not the only fundraising event the Pro-Life Club will be holding this year.
Members of the Pro-Life Club will be selling raffle tickets to students throughout the next couple weeks for the chance to win an iPad 2, Kindle Fire, or Restaurant gift card.” There will also be a send off spaghetti dinner in the cafeteria on Friday, January 13th from 5:30-7:00 p.m. with the cost being $5 dollars for students and $8 dollars for adults, so please come out and support the Pro-Life Club. The neat part about the dinner is that the One Acts are also that evening, so this dinner could serve as a place for people to eat before the show.
