Academic Team places fourth in division

Academic team finishes their regional meet with fourth place in the division, the team hopes to increase their standings and beat Central with their last competition in march.

“We are currently ranked as the fourth best team out of the seven competing in our division, so we, while not the best of all, certainly achieved some level of success among our local school,” said junior Aidan Schmidt.  “Personally, I felt that this is a great result, but I know we can do better in the future. We still have at least one more competition in March to redeem ourselves, and if that doesn’t work out, there’s always next year.  We’re currently ranked just below Central, so there’s always the hope that we can pull ahead of our rivals, in the end.”

Academic team competes against teams in their division answering questions to showcase their intellectual capabilities and general knowledge.

“We prepare by doing practice competitions between or varsity and jv teams,” said sponsor Nicole Jameson. “We use old questions from previous years plus questions that I find online. Students also review common topics like presidents, periodic table, math concepts, and famous authors.”

The questions vary from subject to subject, so creating a team that has more than one specialty is important.

“We answer a variety of questions from math and science to sports trivia so there is something for everyone on the team and having a wide variety of intellectual talent is very important,” Jameson said.

Even though the team can get competitive with each other, according to Schmidt they still preserve the sense of unity that unites all their talents.

“When all is said and done, a sense of cohesion always prevails, and this is necessary for us to be a functional team,” Schmidt said. “In the sense of a single memory, however, my favorite thing would have to be the time when I secured a win for us on a tiebreaker in a heated home game. Even the most obscure classical music facts sometimes pay off in competitions!”

Even though the academic team realm is competitive by nature according to Jameson, one of the main goals of the team is to focus on having fun

“Our biggest goal is to have fun,” Jameson said. “It is a fun team and we like to joke around and have a good time. Ultimately we like to win and win our matches so that we can hopefully move on in the competition but it is fun to answer questions and bond as a team.”