Senior Sid Tandel has been playing sports since he was young. He has always enjoyed both the indoors and outdoors. Although Tandel loves to play video games he also enjoys playing various sports outside.

Tandel has enjoyed playing tennis and skiing in his free time from a young age.

“I think I started playing tennis around the third or second grade, which was also around the same time where I picked up skiing. I had picked them up initially just because I have two older brothers and they both skied and played tennis,” Tandel said.

Tandel has been playing tennis for the high school since his freshman year.

“I’m one of the team captains (on the tennis team) along with Nathan Henderson who is my best friend. We’ve just done everything with each other during quarantine, we play games together, hang out together, Tandel said.”

Many people around the world enjoy skiing, whether it be to relieve stress or just for the rush of going downhill quickly. In fact, there are an estimated 135 million skiers in the world with Tandel being one of them. 

“I just like the rush of being able to go however fast I want and just the feeling of turning in the ice. It’s kind of unexplainable,” Tandel said.

However, Skiing and Tennis are not the only activities Tandel enjoys. He also likes being gaming. 

“Gaming was always just a thing that my brothers did so I kind of picked that up from them. As I’ve grown up I’ve learned that I can make so many relationships and connections through video games. I’ve met some of my best friends through just playing games in general,” Tandel said.

Tancel has mainly played a popular Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA ) called League Of Legends for over 4 years now. League Of Legends has a ranking system which players climb to show their skill and how far they’ve come. Tandel has peaked in Diamond two, one of the highest ranks in the game. There are around 100 million League Of Legends players and only ~2% of them are Diamonds, Tandel’s rank, and even fewer have gotten to the higher stages of diamond. 

“I started playing League Of Legends in my freshman year of high school,” Tandel said. “One of my friends who doesn’t go to HHS said hey we should try it. We have a family friend who is really good at it and he kind of taught us how.” 

Sid plans on going to college majoring in computer science.

“I’m hoping to go to UVA but Virginia Tech is my backup school. I think I always thought I was going to do Computer science at some point in my life” Tandel said.

Sid has been influenced by his brothers not only in the aspects of video games, tennis, and skiing but also in his future career plans.

“My brothers both have Computer Science jobs surprisingly enough and my dad works in IT as well, so it pretty much just runs in the family,” Tandel said.

Although Sid is looking to go to college he’s already thinking about some things that he wants to do after college.

“In 5 years I see myself in a big city somewhere, I don’t know what city really, either California, New York City, or something like that. I just really like big cities, I always have and I just like surrounding myself in large environments,” Tandel said.

Even with all the downsides of COVID-19 Sid chooses to focus on some positives.

“I wouldn’t say my social life wasn’t exactly the most vibrant before quarantine, but I feel like I made a lot of connections during quarantine and have just strengthened some friendships that I already had so I’d say quarantine was not terrible for me,” Tandel said.