Greenhills National Science Bowl team sweeps regionals, heads to national finals

For the third time in four years a Greenhills National Science Bowl team has won its regional competition to advance to the national finals in Washington, D.C.  

Team One, flanked by teacher-coaches Bob Ause, left, and Deano Smith.

The competition, held over the weekend at Saginaw Valley State University, featured three five-person teams from Greenhills, according to coaches and Greenhills science teachers Bob Ause and Deano Smith.

The competition consisted of morning round-robin contests, followed by 12 teams progressing to the double-elimination afternoon bracket. All three Greenhills teams made it to the afternoon competitions, Ause said.

“Coach Smith and I are extremely proud of that,” Ause said.

At the end of the day, Greenhills Team One — Libby Reeves, captain Julian Wellman, Max Froehlich, Jack Urquhart, and Benjamin Kovacs — won the overall competition, sweeping all of their matches. (Perhaps not coincidentally, this was the same team that vanquished a faculty team about a month ago during an upper school assembly.)

Team One will compete again in Washington at the end of April.

Team Two’s members are Nabeel Rehemtulla, Faizan Hassan, captain Madeline Parks, Nathan Rosenberg, and Eric Chen. Team Three includes captain Clara Wellman, Emily Wang, Stuart Atkinsmith, and Delenn Bauer.

“The National Science Bowl continues to be one of the premier academic competitions across the country and prepares America’s students for future successes in some of the world’s fastest growing fields in science, technology, and engineering,” said Dr. J. Stephen Binkley, Acting Director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, which sponsors the nationwide competition. “I am honored to congratulate all the competitors who are advancing to the national finals, where they will continue to showcase their talents as top students in math and science.

The NSB brings together more than 14,000 middle and high school students from across the country each year to compete in a fast-paced question-and-answer format where they solve technical problems and answer questions on a range of science disciplines including biology, chemistry, Earth and space science, physics and math.

The top 16 high school teams and the top 16 middle school teams in the national finals will win $1,000 for their schools’ science departments. Prizes for the top two high school teams for the 2017 NSB will be announced at a later date, but they’re typically pretty exciting. The high school team that won the 2016 NSB earned a nine-day, all-expenses-paid science trip to Alaska, where they learned more about glaciology, marine and avian biology, geology and plate tectonics. The second-place high school team at the 2016 NSB won a five-day, fully guided adventure tour of several national parks, which included a whitewater rafting trip.

More information is available on the NSB website: http://www.science.energy.gov/wdts/nsb/.