Every year, RBHS students in groups of eight or fewer have trudged through mud in a quest to be crowned the best mud volleyball team in the school.  Student council representatives have been arranging the event, which will be May 5, and has been around for many years as a junior fundraiser for their senior week activities the following year. The deadline for team entries is tomorrow, April 28.
“One of our teacher sponsors, [math teacher Angel Renick], coordinated with the Career Center and the fire department,” student council member junior Ronni Farid said. “Then we decided committee chairs—[junior Kelly Wilkerson] andI—and started planning.”
One change this year is that there is no longer one teacher team that will face the champion student team.  Rather, teachers are able to volunteer and submit their own teams to the bracket if they wish.
“As of right now I don’t have a teacher team,” Renick said. “It’s on a voluntary basis only. And I’ve opened it up this year to let any teachers who would like to form their own team and play without working the event.”
The tournament is one of the many events that marks the calendar of every RBHS school year, yet it is uncertain when the tradition started.
“I have materials [concerning the tournament] dating back to 1997,” activities director David Bones said. “But I suspect the tradition is older than that. ”
The mud volleyball tournament is not usually this late in the school year, being changed due to temperature concerns from recent years.
“In the past few years it’s been so miserably cold that [the teacher-student match] has been the shortest game played,” Renick said. “Since it’s the last game of the event, the sun has gone down, it’s freezing cold outside and everyone wants to get out of the mud at that point. ”
 
By Luke Chval