Just before Thanksgiving break, the Pie Eating Contest of 2025 took place. This contest has been a controversial topic since last year, when some competitors were not able to keep their pies down.
As this year’s event drew near, it stirred up many emotions for the members of our school. Some felt so disgusted by last year’s contest that they felt the need to step away from the event. Flora Lucas (‘27) said, “I’m definitely not going to be able to handle it this year,” and reiterated her feelings about the contest by adding, “I truly truly hate it.”
Another person who chose not to partake in the festivities was none other than Humanities teacher Jamie Murray, who is firmly against viewing the contest. When asked if he would be staying to watch, he declared, “I will never see it!”
Despite many students describing the contest as “disgusting,” “nasty” or “just gross,” there were many other crowd members who eagerly anticipated our newly instated tradition. Evelyn Chaffins (‘29) said that she was “extremely excited,” and thought the freshman team had “a pretty good chance,” because “they’ve been fasting.”
Many crowd members made the prediction that it would come down to the juniors and the seniors. Mack Mahoney (‘27) had confidence in his classmates, claiming that he once “saw Liam Kramer put down forty Chick-fil-A nuggets.”
Despite being a senior, Juliette Coté (‘26) had to admit she thought the juniors had the best chance. She said, “I want seniors to win, but I think Owen and Liam will win,” supporting her claim by adding, “I’ve seen Owen in the GAC and it gets pretty bad.”
The contestants were Jack Shane and Cole Sweeney for the freshman class, Carlos Sandoval Yauli and Sean Stroud for the sophomores, Liam Kramer and Owen Grove for the juniors, and Max Schottenfeld and Calvin Schaeffer for the seniors.
When the five-minute timer started, the contestants frantically began attacking their pies, knowing they had to work against the clock. Some took to a scooping method, while the juniors used what Liam Kramer (‘27) called “smash and grab.” As he described it, this is when one person smashes the pie crust, and another grabs the filling, mixing the two together.
The freshmen had a strong work ethic and a technique of scooping large quantities for each bite. But perhaps biting off more than they could chew, they fell behind and landed in third place.
The sophomores started off strong, but ended up finishing last. When asked what went wrong, Sean Stroud (‘28) said, “Everything, probably,” adding that it started to go downhill “once we started throwing pie at each other’s faces.” In response to whether he’d ever enter the contest again, Stroud said, “Maybe senior year? Probably not. That was disgusting.”
As many had predicted, it was a close call between the juniors and seniors. But while the juniors seemed to slow down as the contest wore on, there was no stopping the seniors on their path to victory.
However, the juniors were not in bad spirits because of their second-place standing. Kramer actually found the competition to be easier than expected, and said, “The pie was a lot more viscous” than he had imagined. He went on to say, “This did not ruin pumpkin pie for me. I thought it might.”
Kramer even congratulated the seniors on their hard work, and said, “If I had to choose somebody to lose to, it would have been them.” Kramer and Grove have not been discouraged from competing, and Kramer confidently said, “We’re coming back for redemption next year.” Perhaps with this year’s winners graduating, the Class of 2027 will get a second chance at being champions.
The contest ended in about two minutes and thirty seconds, the seniors only needing half the allotted time to finish their task. In a short interview right after his accomplishment, Max Schottenfeld said, “I didn’t have a doubt in my mind [that they would win]”, adding, “I thought it would be harder.”
Schottenfeld then went into his team’s tactics for the event. He said that “the strategy going into it was to attack the filling first. So we got the filling, we squished that, and we just started eating that down, and once we got like 70% of that done, we started going for the crust.”
Mikaela Resch (‘26) asked that it be on the record that “he asked for a second pie after the first one,” and said she was confident that he could finish the task. Schottenfeld confirmed he felt capable of eating another pie and shared that he was about to eat a full lunch. Eating a full meal after squaring off a 3,840-calorie pie might seem unlikely, but Schottenfeld leaves us with the inspiring words “I’m still hungry.”
