Our own Foothill High School in Palo Cedro is off to the Nationals...this was in the local paper, the Record Searchlight today...read on, please...
Science bowl competitors work on team chemistry
PALO CEDRO - The Foothill High School students traveling to Washington, D.C., for the National Science Bowl have one goal.
"Do better than Chico did last year," said senior Nick Rossow.
The same Foothill team competing this year lost in regional competition to the Chico High School team last year. The Foothill students watched Chico's progress at the nationals last year, where they finished second to last, the Foothill team said.
They all hope to do better than that when they compete at the nation's capital next month.
Foothill beat 10 schools and 24 teams to win the Regional Science Bowl in Redding on March 7 and will travel next to Washington, D.C., on April 30 to compete in the U.S. Department of Energy National Science Bowl.
They'll compete against 66 other teams; the top 16 finishers will win $1,000 each, to be given to their high schools' science departments.
Foothill's win at regionals was hard fought.
"We answered ... roughly 125 questions," said Zane Silver, a senior.
The competition is set up like a game show. Two teams sit across from each other at a table and are given questions by a moderator. Questions cover everything from physics to chemistry to trigonometry. Team members quickly work out the solution, and the first to ring the buzzer with the correct answer wins the round.
Looking back, the members of the team admitted they may have gone into the competition a little overconfident.
"We went in totally unprepared last year and came out third," Rossow said. "We went into this year pretty cocky."
"Maybe a little too cocky," said teammate Nick Cerami, a senior.
They lost one of their first rounds during the morning competition but still had a good enough record to advance to the afternoon playoffs. There, they narrowly beat the Chico High School team in the semifinals - a match that went into triple overtime.
Then they moved on to face Shasta High for the championship.
"That team had already lost one round in playoffs and had to beat us twice to win the title," said Matt Fowler, the team's coach and a science teacher at Foothill.
As the finals began, Shasta High won the first round, making it anyone's game.
"The final round was a nail-biter, with our team winning the title by just one question," Fowler said.
The five team members, Rossow, Cerami, Silver, Brett Hodge and Coulter Knapp - the team's lone junior - plan to continue studying science after high school, each hoping to make a career of it. Most of them hope to become engineers.
"I think everyone here plans on pursuing science of some kind," Silver said.
Rob Rogers can be reached at 225-8217 or at rrogers@redding.com.
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