What’s Senior Assassin and why is it taking over NJ high schools?

If you saw the headline and were worried this was a new form of bullying, stop. No misleading here. It’s not. But some say it could be dangerous. To me it sounds like tremendous fun.

It’s called Senior Assassin in some high schools. In others it’s simply being called Senior Water Wars. These are happening in April and May depending on the school and the rules can vary a bit town to town.

Basically it's where high school seniors arm themselves with water guns and form teams and they are assigned other students as 'targets'. Of course they are also someone else's target.

The object is to sneak up and blast their unsuspecting target with H2O and usually their team partner records it for evidence. These are not sanctioned by the schools and never take place on school grounds during school hours.

It's more like hiding at 5 in the morning in the bushes outside your target's house waiting for them to come out. Or if their sibling doesn't like them maybe cutting a deal to be invited into the target's home and hide in their closet to blast them when they walk in the room. Sometimes it could be catching them coming out of work. On a walk to their car. All kinds of ways.

It very much sounds like gang hits, real Sopranos stuff, except with harmless water. Money is ponied up to enter. Some schools are doing it where half the pot goes to the winning team and the other half goes to charity.

I never heard of this until a week ago. I was at work when I received this mysterious group text from my son to my daughter and me.

Never having heard of this before at first I was thinking "well of course you can’t go inside someone’s home unless someone lets them in otherwise that’s breaking and entering!” But over this week I learned all about this game and it made more sense.

My son’s charity of choice should his team win is St. Jude Children’s Hospital. It’s a nice thing for kids to do to raise money for a charity, but some have an issue with it.

A police officer called our show who spoke of concerns for kids’ safety. For example, if someone who knows nothing of this game sees a teenager with what looks like a gun in the dark creeping around someone’s windows it could end tragically if they overreact and grab their own real gun.

I thought the same thing, but honestly I think word gets around to the police pretty fast in towns where this is going on. And some towns, like Bridgewater I'm told, has had high school students playing Senior Assassin for many years. Some young police officers maybe played it themselves just 8 years prior.

Just how many New Jersey towns are playing this water mob hit game? Unclear. But when we asked on-air if anybody heard of it phone lines quickly jammed and even high school seniors were calling in who are forming teams now.

If you want to know more about this crazy game and some of the common rules go here.

Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Jeff Deminski only.

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