The academic team had a winning year, with an undefeated regular season record of 16-0. Following the team’s regular season, they took second place at both Districts and Regionals and tied for fifth with Stonewall Jackson at the State meet on Feb 23.
The team, which AHS considers a varsity sport, practices after school three times a week. “During our practice, we basically read and answer a lot of questions and review them so that the knowledge stays in our head,” senior captain HeeSeok Joo said.
Coach Matt Clay, who has been coaching for seven years, said that at practices “we try to explode our minds with knowledge on an hourly basis by reading old questions and figuring out the answers.” At meets, questions can be asked in a wide variety of categories, such as literature, physics, and history, so the team works hard to cover all areas of academia.
World History teacher Richard Lindsay “often visits academic team during practice, and he tells some funny stories that usually involves fishing with Mr. Clay,” Joo said. “The stories were funny, but [the] funnier thing was when academic team members get world history questions before Mr. Lindsay did.”
Clay said that a challenging aspect of the team’s preparation is “fielding a well-balanced team, meaning covering as much knowledge as possible.” He said that the team has “done a wonderful job of practicing on their own…they got faster and more confident with their answers and buzzing in early.”
According to Joo, “The hardest thing was to be motivated enough to seek information by ourselves…Most of our team members take insanely hard classes in school, so desire for new information outside of school would not be an ideal activity after school. Believe or not, we all have this thing called ‘life’ too.”
Meets are Jeopardy-style, in which the reader reads a question and both competing teams try to buzz in first. Senior Meghana Illendula said that, “Our matches consist of three rounds, two toss-up rounds…and one directed round which consists of 10 shorter, more recent questions that are directed to each team. The other team can steal questions.”
The categories of questions can range from science to sports to pop culture, according to Joo. “I think that’s the beauty of academic team,” Joo said. “…In fact, one of the answers from this season was “#YOLO.”
Joo added that “academic team questions can be about anything…another answer to a question was the song ‘Call Me Maybe’. The question basically summarized the plot of the music video. Because of these highly random answers, we were expecting a question about ‘Gangnam Style’ in either Regionals or States, but sadly, it never happened.”
Joo said that “this is my last year, and our team got the best results so far since Mr. Clay has been coaching. Just being with the team members is very meaningful to me because I truly care about them.”
Illendula agreed that “we’ve had immense success as a team this season. We have people who have expertise in different areas like our captain HeeSeok Joo who specializes in astronomy and physics and [senior] Alex Perez-Reyes who has been our Most Valuable Player by being a literary bad-ass,” she said. “[Senior] Karunasai Mahadevan and myself specialize in science and I specialize in mythology as well. [Senior] Ryan Lake, our long standing mathematician is also an integral part of our success.”
Joo thinks that the best part about academic team is the people. “Wherever you go for competition, the place is full of people who are passionate about learning, which is an important trait in life,” he said. “Also, the Albemarle team members are incredible people.”
The most rewarding part of academic team for Illendula is “competing by using our major talent (which happens to be knowledge) and winning. I love doing it with people who I respect and know share the passion for learning that I do.”
While the team will lose eight leading seniors at the end of this year, “we also have a really healthy underclassmen crop that I feel positively about,” Clay said.
Joo said that, “people may call us ‘nerds’, but nerds aren’t really insults. It just means that we are passionate about something and we are enthusiastic about it. We have desire to learn, and know more.”
This passion yielded winning results from the team this year, and Illendula hopes that, “our team continues to do well in the following years and continues the success we’ve had this year.”
