From red to green to pink to orange, an abundance of students wearing the colors of the rainbow flooded the courtyard during lunch on Feb. 14 to compete in Archer’s fifth Color Wars competition. The annual event serves as a community bonding experience in which each grade is assigned a color to wear for the day along with opportunities to participate in activities such as tug of war and relay races.

“Everyone gets really excited and everyone’s decked out in all of their colors,” sophomore Justine Moore said. “School spirit is just miles high during Color Wars.”

Senior Sarah Shintani repeated this statement and commented on how spirit events such as Color Wars foster both spirit and competition among grades.

“I think it’s really fun because … we’re coming together as an entire school, but it also brings out the competitive side where each of the grades are competing,” Shintani said. “Events like this bring everyone to the courtyard and spirit is shared, which is a really interesting dynamic that I enjoy.”

While some students cheered on their grades from the side, others competed in various competitions.

“I think Color Wars is the reason why the grade competition is so fierce,” sophomore class representative Langdon Janos said. “Color Wars really gets everyone in the spirit.”

Before the events of the day began, students had the opportunity to decorate their grade’s door in their color. After the door decorating, students participated in a game of tug of war, drawing a grade level mural and different relay races. This year, the relays were centered around finding the bubble gum in a whipped cream pie, a water balloon toss and melting an ice cube.

“[Color Wars] allows for an environment where everyone gets together, and it’s fun competing,” sophomore class representative Marissa Gendy said. “[It’s] not bad competing, where everyone’s trying to win. It’s more like we’re trying to help each other win.”

Moore echoed this statement by comparing this atmosphere to her “favorite part” about Color Wars: the tug of war.

“It’s just really fun seeing all the grades just fight [and] go against each other,” Moore said. “The competitiveness of everyone is just really fun. The energy is really great.”

The seniors, who wore red, won this year’s Color Wars. Janos said she was “excited” to see this year’s outcome, given that the current seniors won last year’s spirit cup.

“The seniors have just raised the bar in terms of competition, so everyone is extremely spirited and excited about everything,” Janos said. “Everyone’s just putting in so much effort.”

Shintani said that she will “miss” the “specific things” Archer does to contribute to friendly school spirit and competition in college.

“I’ve been here since sixth grade so I’ve been able to experience [these events] for seven years now,” Shintani said. “During the college process, because of Archer, I was looking at schools that had really strong school spirit, so hopefully they’ll have something similar.”

At the end of the day, Gendy said that she felt “proud” of her contribution to making Color Wars possible.

“It was a little stressful, but when you finally get to see it all put together, it’s really awesome,” Gendy said. “It’s a lot of fun to finally feel very accomplished.”

Correction Statement (March 9, 2020, 8:17 p.m.): A previous version of this article misidentified Alexa Grant as Shayla Covington in the caption of the featured image.