English Academic Team Goes To State

Saturday, May 7th, the English Academic Team went to state to compete. This was the team’s first time going to state in a decade, and everyone on the team was very excited. Mrs. Zelencik is in charge of the team and traveled with the team to compete with the four members: Logan Hufty, Kailee Monroe, Abby Flick, and Penelope Dearth.

So what is the English Academic Team? According to the team captain, Logan Hufty, 12, “At surface level, English Academic Team looks like just extracurricular test-taking, but there is more to it than that. It’s all about learning about a new topic or going more in-depth about a semi-well-known topic such as the Roaring 20s or Canada. It’s nice to learn about something that I probably wouldn’t even have thought of. At competitions, we go and answer 25 questions about whatever literature we read. It’s pretty interesting overall.”

The team members are very excited about the accomplishments they have made while making their way up to state.

 “I’m very excited to go to State,” said Abby Flick, 11. “We qualified first in our class, so that should put us in a good position going into the competition. Everyone who qualified for English in our class scored the same amount of points (we qualified for first based on a tie-breaker), so it will be a tight competition. Everybody on the team has worked really hard these past few weeks to study and look over the material again, so I think we will end up doing really well!”

The team did not end up winning, but did place 6th overall in the state. 

“Sadly, no win, but I am still proud of the team and how far we got considering this is the first time the English team has made it to state in years,” said Hufty. “We ended up coming 6th at the competition, which basically means 6th in the entire state for our class as far as I know. It was very close overall. I think the first 3 teams all got 23/25 questions correct, the next 3 got 21/25, and the last one got 19 or something like that. It all came down to the tiebreakers.”