You wake up at five in the morning to start getting ready for school. You leave your house at seven and drive straight to the junior lot, a whole hour and fifteen minutes early. Why? Because that is the only place where you are safe. Wait, safe from what? Foam Nerf bullets. Yes, this is what is going on right now across most of Cherokee County including Sequoyah. Nerf Wars are a fairly new tradition that made their debut at Sequoyah last year. They involve one–on–one team matches and ultimately a final tournament. The game is pretty simple—do not get shot. 

In order to enter the war, you must have a team of five and pay an entry fee, which goes to the winner. Every week, your team of five is put against another team of five and you have from Monday until Sunday to try and shoot each other with a Nerf gun. You can shoot them at their workplace when they are off the clock, at dinner, or even in their front yard. The only places off limits are on school property, sporting events, while the person is actually clocked in at work, and gyms. The team who has the most people left “alive” wins that week’s match. The matches are important to win because they create your placement for the final tournament which determines the overall winner.  

Nerf Wars have taken over a lot of people’s daily lives. Senior Connor Johnston’s life has been taken over the most. Johnston is the commissioner of the Nerf Wars, and he has a big job on his hands.  

“I am basically the [referee] of Nerf to make sure teams follow all the rules and guidelines,” Johnston said., “I am also in charge of scheduling and seeding teams for the tournament.”  

Being the commissioner was handed down to Johnston by last year’s group of commissioners as it is a different senior every year. He finds this form of competition a way to have fun during a typically boring stretch of the school year. 

“[The main reason for Nerf] is to really just have fun. It gets a lot of kids out of the house and gives them a reason to communicate with each other and hopefully make some new friends,” Johnston said. 

Senior Chad Gunter is an extremely dedicated Nerf player. This is his second year participating. He played last year and had so much fun that heim and his team came back for a second round. 

“Our team’s motivation is to stay the number one ranked team and to win the prize money,” Gunter said. 

However, recently a big wrench has been thrown into the game—Coronavirus. With school being out, sports being cancelled, and almost everywhere being closed, the nerf war has also been put on a hiatus.  

“With the recent news of Cherokee County declaring a state of emergency and a ‘shelter in place’ Nerf will be postponed until April 9th… Hopefully this will all be back to normal sooner than later,” the official Nerf War Twitter account posted on March 27th.  

Everything in our world right now has been put on pause, even Nerf wars, but hopefully soon people can get back out into Hickory Flat and continue their path to Nerf victory.