On a seemingly normal night about a month ago, 22-year-old Garrett Hohn and the rest of his ASU intramural football team did what any other team would have done after winning a game: They went out to celebrate.
After being named the Men’s Academic Champions and taking third place in the Tempe campus tournament at the end of the regular season, the team was looking forward to advancing into ASU’s Pan-Campus Tournament a few weeks later.
It was a goal Hohn and his teammates had worked the whole season to achieve.
However, what happened next not only changed the course of their season, but inevitably the rest of their lives.
“We had a game one night, we won and we were all having a good time,” kinesiology junior Richard Ramsay said. “The next morning, we found out that Garrett was murdered the night before.”
On Friday, Sept. 26, Hohn was stabbed and killed while walking home from the Mill Avenue District with his teammate.
Since then, the team has been playing for much more than a championship.
“We started this team for the W.P. Carey School of Business because most of us are business students,” accounting junior Matt Walker said. “We just wanted to come out here and have fun, and it ended up being something a lot more than that for us.”
Sunday, the team achieved their goal by making it to the tournament, which is held at the end of the intramural flag football season every year.
Each campus selects its top teams to compete in the Pan-Campus Tournament, which is played at the Student Recreation Complex fields on Tempe campus. This year, there were two teams from the Polytechnic campus, two from the West campus, one from the Downtown campus and three from the Tempe campus.
In their first game Sunday, the W.P. Carey School beat West campus’ Da Regulators, to advance into the semifinal match against the Polytechnic campus’ Boss Pockets.
In the championship Sig Ep Red defeated W.P. Carey School 27-6 to win the title.
“In the first half, we were neck-in-neck,” pre-med and political science senior Le’Kendrick Brewer said. “They scored points, but in the second half … we just opened things up and started going at them.”
Sig Ep Red, which has won the championship two years in a row, will participate in the National Intramural-Recreational Sports Association West Regional tournament along with the W.P. Carey School, on Nov. 7–9.
Reach the reporter at emiley.darling@asu.edu.
