By AUSTIN STANKOWSKI

SPASH Mirror reporter

On Wednesday, Sept. 27, Stevens Point Area Senior High (SPASH) held its annual Mr. SPASH event. Tom Hatton was crowned the winner of this year’s festivities after a fierce competition between 18 contestants.

The event is a part of the annual homecoming festivities and crowns what many schools would consider homecoming king. The event is led up to by a school-wide vote to decide the contestants, and practice for the contestants on Monday and Tuesday the week of the event.

During the event, prizes were given away to students who bought advance tickets. Principal Jon Vollendorf said, “We gave out a Raleigh bike, two 32 inch TVs, and over $1000 in total prizes.”

To become Mr. SPASH you must be “funny, a hard worker, have good dance skills, and be well liked by everyone.“ At least that’s according to red team member John Weddle.

The event is a lot of work and a school-wide effort according to Todd Vanderloop, the organizer of Mr. SPASH, and video productions teacher at SPASH. Vanderloop said, “It takes a lot of time and organization. It’s more or less me relying on 17, 18-year-old guys to put this together and create a great show as well as a lot of help from the POMS and stage crew, overall it’s a pretty big event.”

To kick it off, both teams presented their intro videos, which helped the audience see who exactly, many of these students are. The videos created many laughs among the crowd, which opened them up for further fun later on.

Next, both teams partook in a best of seven series, in which whoever won four events first would win. The first event was a competition where both teams matched up with half of the cheerleaders, and they developed a special cheer for their team.

Red team seemed to win over the crowd by a large margin, and the homecoming court members, who were the judges, scores reflected that as the vote went 6-1 Red. By winning the court vote the Red team was awarded the first point of the night in the best of seven series.

Next was a bull riding and big boxing match that were put on simultaneously. The Black team dominated the bull riding with a record of 6-3, while Red team dominated boxing with a final record of 5-1-2.

Both teams were awarded a point and the tally went up to 2-1 in favor of the Red Team.

The next competition was SPASH Has Talent. Both teams had to present five talents. The Black team won the overall point as they won the competition 5-0.

Mateo Soik and Michael Glodosky pulled off a stunning recreate of the classic Blades of Glory fire and ice routine which was the biggest highlight of the talent show.

With the score knotted up, the competition turned to the SPASH dance team to perform a routine. Brady Woyak and Talie Zinda fired up the crowd with their high-flying performance, but a stunning decision by the court eliminated them causing the crowd to rain down boos.

The Black Team once again won this competition to complete their comeback and take a 3-2 lead, only needing one point to move on to the finals.

The next event was an oversized trike race where both teams would race two contestants at a time, with the final amount of places they finished deciding the winner of the point. The Black team quickly had a five-point lead, but Cole Wright wanted to go down fighting.

He first won the third race of the night cutting the deficit to two, then he raced again as the “tenth man” and won again tying the overall score and sending it into sudden death. Cole was once again summoned upon to race Black team captain Leif Akemann. Cole once again defended his title by winning the race and sending the overall competition to a crucial seventh event.

The event was a balloon stop-off, where both teams attached balloons to their ankles, and had to stay in a square while trying to pop all of the other team’s balloons in one minute. After one minute both teams had balloons left, but the Black team had one more, and they moved on to the American Idol performances.

There always is one wildcard from the losing team, and Tom Hatton was selected as this year’s wildcard with the crowd cheering loudest for him out of all the Red team members.

Hatton delivered on the wildcard by performing a stunning recreate of Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean”. He advanced to the finals where he would compete against birthday boy Gabe Rodriguez, and Michael Glodosky.

After a loud and exciting crowd cheer off, Hatton was awarded Mr. SPASH 2017. Vanderloop said, “Tom is a great representative of the student body. He put the time in and ended up winning because of it.”