PROSPERITY — The Mid-Carolina High School Academic Challenge Team is heading to the state championship in March for the third time in a row.
In its third year, the Academic Challenge Team was started to help address different curricular standards. The late Bennie Bennett received an invitation from the Western Piedmont Education Consortium, the regional coalition of school districts, asking him to participate and Bennett thought that it would be a good idea. This was another reason why the Academic Challenge Team was first created.
The team practices all year, with the exception of summer. For the first half of the year, the team met everyday for at least half an hour and then met twice a week for about an hour after school. Now that the regular season is over, the team is still meeting three times a week after school for one hour twice a week and for two hours once a week.
“There are four main bowls that the team attends,” said Academic Challenge Team Advisor Lukas McCormick. “This year the team was undefeated, but the total points accumulated is the most important. That determines where we go when it comes to the regional tournament. The regional tournament is a three-day competition and whichever school comes out on top will go to the State Championship.”
WPEC sends two schools, a small school and large school. Mid-Carolina falls into the small school category, so there will ultimately be two state champions.
Topics covered in competition are usually on an 11th-12th grade level, with some college level content and include mythology, social studies, geography, American government, mathematics and science.
“For the regular questions, they have 10 seconds to answer and on a math computation they have 30 seconds. So they tell them beforehand that the question is a math computation,” said Dr. Lorrie Kibler, co-sponsor of the Academic Challenge Team.
“One of the aspects of having students who perform as well as we do is we have very self-confident and driven young people. On one hand you have to encourage and motivate them to keep going and on the other hand you have to temper their confidence so that they realize they’re not invulnerable,” said McCormick. “We have lost the previous two championships, so this is a team that knows how to take a hit, to get back up and keep going.”
Jackson Delk, one of the Academic Challenge Team co-captains, is ready.
“This year, we’re doing other competitions with USC and Presbyterian College so that we can get practice beforehand because there was this big break between regionals and state, so we got out of practice last year. This year, we’re going to practice in between more with real competition so we’ll get the practice we need to win this year,” Delk said. “We have a wonderful team. We couldn’t get anywhere we have without every single person on the team and one person isn’t doing everything. We all work together for one goal and I’m just glad to be part of leading these people to actually achieve our goals.”
The championship will be held in Columbia at a location to be determined. This will be an all day event.
The Mid-Carolina Academic Challenge Team members are Jackson Delk (co-captain), Grace Alger (co-captain), Grant Mays, Brandon “Wugee” Kelly, Josh Blancher, Julian McCormick, Andrew Boland, Matthew Boland, William Bowers, Kayla Clark (team manager), Anna Craven, Nick Douglas, Torey Gooding, Amanda Holloway, Marcos Izquierdo, Robert McDonald, Joe Murray, Ethan Yamin and Riley Elridge.