'Makes you feel young again:' Senior assassin game kicks off at UNC

Zoe Durland, a UNC senior, was leaving Pantana Bob’s on April 2 when she felt a spray of water hit her. That’s when she knew that she lost UNC Senior Assassin.

Senior Assassin is an annual competition in which members of the senior class at UNC try to eliminate other participants by spraying them with water guns. If a participant gets hit or does not hit their target by the end of the week, they're out. But, if they manage to evade the water guns and catch their target, they get to advance to the next round.

Once a participant sprays their assigned target, they then move on to get that person's target.

Seniors Tucker Adkins and Boyce Huckabee are the game's coordinators. Adkins organized her high school's game of Senior Assassin, and played a role in organizing every aspect of this year's game, from outreach to deciding the rules of the game.

Each Monday while the game is in session, participants receive the name of a target to track down before the deadline of the following Sunday at 11:59 p.m. On Mondays, Adkins and Huckabee go through the names and see who was eliminated. The round officially starts on Tuesdays at 12:01 a.m.

The cycle will repeat until one person is left standing.

A form to enter the game was sent out to a GroupMe of more than 600 seniors on March 29  who are either graduating in May or already graduated in December. Members of the group were also encouraged to tell their friends about the game to get as many people involved as possible.

The game officially began on April 2 with 310 seniors involved and will tentatively end before spring Commencement on May 11. Each player had to give $5 to the prize fund — 85 percent of which will go to the winner and 15 percent of which will go to the person with the most hits.

One of the game's biggest rules is that no hits can happen on campus, so players have been known to stake out their target’s places of work or frequently patronized businesses.

Players have gone to great lengths to win the over-$1,000 prize fund.. Senior Holly Springate said she stayed out until 1:30 a.m. on April 2 to try and get her target, even waiting outside of a cocktail she knew they were attending.

“People have been taking it really seriously, trying to avoid hotspot areas and figuring out who they have," she said.

There has been a senior assassin game at UNC for at least the past 10 years, Adkins said, but she believes this year’s game tops the rest.

“I definitely feel like it’s gained a little bit more traction this year than it usually has, which is fun for me because I can say that I was a part of that,” she said.

Some participants said the game brings the senior class together and is a good distraction from the fact that they’re graduating in less than a month.

“We’re getting older and about to enter the real world, and playing a fun game like this kind of makes you feel young again,” Durland said. “It’s such a fun, light-hearted game that brings us all together and kind of makes you forget about all of this ending.”

@dailytarheel | university@dailytarheel.com