APRIL FOOL’S DISCLAIMER:
The story below is intended as humor only and is not intended to be accurate.  All RB community participants in the story provided written permission for their names to appear.

After several long discussions, a few tears shed, and plenty of controversy, a new sport has been added at Riverside-Brookfield. Poker is the name of the game and it is going to be a sport, not a club.

Poker will be considered a winter sport and will have all of their games played in the main gym. It is a cut sport and from the looks of it, there will be a lot of competition to make the team. At the meeting to determine whether poker would be a sport at RB, exactly 1000 kids showed up, and all appeared determined to get poker to be a sport. Once the administration saw the how many students showed up, they immediately gave in to the demands. All of the one thousand kids say that they will try out in the winter of the 2011-2012 school year.

Even several kids from local schools such as Nazareth and Lyons Township were at the meeting because those schools don’t yet have poker teams. One student for a local high school said he would transfer now that RB got a poker.

The coaches have not been selected yet, but the administration says that they want the varsity head coach to have experience in the World Series of Poker, preferably having finished in the top five in a competition.

The addition of this poker team has not made everyone happy, though. Coaches of winter sports such as basketball, swimming, and wrestling are angry because nearly every star player has decided to try out for poker. The rosters for these other winter sports will most likely be made up of rejects from the poker team. The basketball coaches are especially mad because the poker matches will be held on Friday nights in the main gym. This means that the basketball home games will be held in the East gym or the field house. The enormously popular Sixth Man has also decided to stay in the main gym to cheer for the poker team, meaning that the crowd at the basketball game will plummet.

The winter sport coaches aren’t the only people angered by this. The class of 2011 is mad because they won’t be able to compete on the poker team because they are graduating. Several seniors are contemplating failing on purpose, so that they would have to come back as super-seniors, just so that they could try out for the poker team in 2011-2012.

One senior that is especially mad is 6-9 standout basketball senior Alex Dziagwa. He is going to college for basketball, but he swears that poker is his pastime. “I’m mad that they waited until I graduated to start a poker team. I would have quit basketball in a second to join the poker team. Every match I would wear my orange vest and it would be unstoppable,” he said.

More controversy is sure to follow until the team is finally selected in November.