On Wednesday, March 19, 2025, John Dewey students competed against staff in a basketball game from 4 to 6 p.m. in the big gym. There were 11 staff and 24 students participating in the game.
Some of the members of the staff team were Mr. Chandler, Mr. Barkley, Mr. Wong, Mr. McGowan, Mr. Sosa, Mr. Shammas, and Ms. Myrianthopoulos.
“It’s going to be electric,” said Assistant Coach and member of the staff team Christian Sosa, “It would be pretty electrifying for everybody to just be there and just come together and have fun. It brings everybody together.”
Students from the basketball team are also eligible to participate in the Student vs Staff game, with some having competed this year as well. This marks a change from previous years, where members of the team were not allowed to participate.
“It’s cool that we are able to play in the game this year,” said senior and member of the Dewey Dragons Ayman Mriss. “The students have never won before, so maybe we can finally win.”
Of course, neither side believes that they will lose and the faculty team is equally determined to win this year’s game.
“We don’t plan on losing to the students,” said Mr. Sosa, “If I have to, I’ll guard any one of the students’ full court and make sure that they don’t score.”
Students are not eligible to participate if they are failing two or more classes, skip class, or have poor academic standing. Students also have to apply before the March 7th deadline.
The organizers for this event are Ms. Balsamo, Ms. Escalera, Ms. Stone, Mr. Monti, Ms. Doceti and Ms. Savino. Some of the challenges that they went through in organizing the game was determining which students would make the final roster for the game.
“Some of the challenges we had to go through were that we had to go through the students’ transcripts and come up with a team,” said one of the organizers for the game Kimberly Savino, “We had a lot of applicants and we had to go through a lot of transcripts and that can take up a lot of time.”
This event has happened every year except for 2024 due to a partition being constructed in the gym in order to divide the spaces used for Physical Education. This was done to prevent students from purposely attending the wrong gym class. There was also construction being done on the windows at the time.
“The game wasn’t hosted last year because they had to put the wall up in the gym to separate the gym classes because there was a lot of mess, a lot of confusion,” said Mr. Sosa, “A lot of kids that weren’t supposed to be there, to my remembrance.”
During the first half, the student team was winning by a decent margin. The staff team turned this around in the second half- at one point, the staff led by 11 points. However, late in the fourth quarter, the student team fought back to bring it within 2 points. In a nail biter, the staff defended their lead to the end, once again winning the game by 6 points.
There was a dance performed by members of the K-Pop club to the song “How You Like That” by BLACKPINK during halftime. The performance was well received by students. This gave them an opportunity to showcase their talents prior to International Night, which will be on Friday, April 25th.
