The WHS student council has decided to include both the recently introduced “Color Blast” event, and the traditional dodgeball tournament preceding the annual Spirit Day, which will occur on Nov. 22. Color Blast took place on Nov. 20 from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m at the high school. The date of the dodgeball tournament is yet to be determined, but it will be held after Thanksgiving break due to scheduling conflicts with a Boosters event for fall sports.

According to student council Vice President Kanming Xu, there have been concerns in past years about dodgeball being geared towards athletically inclined males. This year, the student council negotiated with the administration to bring back dodgeball, but on two conditions. Teams must be constituted of three boys and three girls, and there will be no game between the faculty and the student winners of the tournament.

“There are so many people in Wayland, and we didn’t want to just focus on one small group of super athletic boys in the school,” Xu said.

Xu does not believe that the student body will react negatively to the new regulations the Student Council chose to adopt.

“I feel like people don’t really care about those regulations [because] they just want to play dodgeball,” Xu said.

Some students were upset when the dodgeball tournament was replaced with color blast last year.

“For the first two years of high school, we had dodgeball, and it was always the highlight of Spirit Day, so I looked forward to it every year,” senior Matt Clayton said. “I didn’t see anything wrong with it, so when they took it away, I was kind of disappointed.”

According to Xu, color blast was a success last year, so the student council decided to bring it back. Food, music and a “cool judging system” will be present. Xu indicated his belief that there was no controversy surrounding color blast last year.

“I mean, what controversy is there? If you don’t like color blast, you don’t have to go,” Xu said. “[That’s] the beauty of color blast.”

Student council is attempting to engage all different interests across the school, and they believe that holding both the dodgeball tournament and color blast will do just that.

“[Dodgeball and color blast] balance the interests of different kinds of people because that’s really what students council wants: to appeal to the entire student body,” student council President Jaylen Wang said. “Dodgeball has been challenged in the past because not everybody has been able to participate.”

According to Xu, he would select color blast over dodgeball if a decision was necessary to choose between the two.

“In these circumstances, it’s nice to have colors up during spirit day,” Xu said. “[I would keep] color blast for sure. You can always hold a dodgeball tournament any other time.”

Last year, former student council President Curran Murphy told WSPN that student council chose not to hold both color blast and dodgeball because holding both could siphon attention from each other. Xu does not share that sentiment.

“It’s not like they’re two physical activities,” Xu said. “It’s not a spikeball tournament one day and a dodgeball [tournament] the other. Everyone can participate in both events without feeling like they’re getting overloaded on one side of their palate.”