One of the Homecoming events this year was the video game tournament, where teams across different classes brawl against each other in various video games. This year, the selected games were “Valorant,” “Minecraft,” “Brawl Stars” and “Clash Royale.” Students came together online for a chance to score points for their class.
“I think it’s pretty cool,” junior Neil Ramarapu said. “Obviously, we have to focus on studying first, especially at TJ, [but] just nice to take a weekend and spend [homecoming] playing games with your friends and remembering that we do this for fun.”
Classes were placed in a bracket for each game, going against each other in order to win. In the end, the seniors won the majority of the games, using various tactics to do so.
“Before the tournament, we said that each person would have a [different] role, and we went with it as we played the game,” senior Rocco Zhang said. “A lot of things could happen during the match so there’s not too much strategy that you can go off.”
In the past, seniors usually won the tournament by a landslide, but this year was different, especially for the “Valorant” tournament. With freshmen coming second to seniors, this left the seniors very surprised.
“We weren’t expecting much because we knew the other classmen. This year was not the strongest, so we weren’t anticipating that much competition,” senior Brain Ho said. “But then [the] class of 2028 really surprised us. They beat us in the first game and took us to the second game.”
With seniors often being confident and winning the most during the homecoming video game tournament, this year’s freshmen brought immense pressure upon them.
“[Along with] the pressure on being [senior] class, the higher the expectations are, the bigger the disappointment is if you lose. You definitely have huge expectations especially now that the class of 2024 has graduated, because they were historically our only competition,” said Ho.
Even after a very competitive homecoming tournament this year, students reflect on the opportunity they get to participate in these types of events.
“The video game tournament is really a special part of homecoming. It gives some representation to students who are interested in gaming,” Ho said.