By — Mia Cramaro

Academic team is the school-wide team that focuses on trivia. They get ready by asking questions after school, they prepare going through different materials and repetition of topics. The members of the team also study on their own time specific topics and also use different online resources, such as Quizlet. This year was a different year for the Academic Team because they placed first in the district competition and hosted the regional championship.

“We have competitions like the sports teams and the E-Sports team. We will hold practices from 2-5 days a week all depending if we have competitions that week. We typically have 1 competition every week, or at least through the season. And on a competition night we are having a match between three different schools.” Matthew Crisp said. 

The way the matches go is that a moderator poses questions to the teams. There are three rounds per match. Two rounds are alone and one is a collaboration with the whole team where the team can work together to get an answer. The way the questions work is that the more the member of the team answers the easier the questions are. If a member of the team buzzes in before the questions is over and are wrong then five points are deducted from the team. However any correctly answered questions are worth 10 points. 

“Our team placed first because of all the practice we had with Mr. Crisp and Mr. Kristian.” Said Eshal Fooruq, a member of the team. 

In the districts tournament they won the first round and lost the second round to Loudoun Valley. However this tournament is a double elimination, so when it came down to the end they played Loudoun Valley again. Tuscarora beat Loudoun Valley twice in a row and headed off to regionals. 

Crisp said about the district tournament; “The first loss we had against them was really close but the two we beat them in the team was very relaxed. We beat them comfortably in the last two matches.” 

The season was cut after a loss against Millbrook. However this year was quite a year for the Academic Team going to the district tournament all the way to the regional tournament. Overall Crisp is quite pleased by his team and is excited about what is to come for them.