SciOly Regionals:

After waking up at 6:30, I was pretty excited to finally compete at my first in-person SciOly tournament of this season. On the drive there, I studied Microbe Mission so my partner wouldn’t kill me for incompetence (I’m literally carrying her tho fr), so I read through Chapter 19 of Campbell. As I arrived at SRMHS, I went to the vending machine to get some caffeine in. When I got there, I put my stuff down and immediately talked to brandon_y0320. We talked for a while, and I also met AC, who also went to NCSSM. After socializing for a while, it was time to compete in my first event: Microbe Mission.

It didn’t take us very long to find the Microbe Mission room, since I still had a decent memory of where the rooms were from last year. My partner and I ended up arriving way too early, and we were just waiting there for like 20 minutes. During that time, I ended up going insane because I was in a slight caffeine rush. The event was in stations, which was the first time that I had ever done anything that had stations. After conversing with my partner and scribbling random things on the “Destress” section of the answer sheet, it was finally time for the test to begin. Some teams didn’t show up, which I found amusing, but we did pretty well on the first few stations, and then we hit Station 10. Station 10 matched pictures to a bacterium, which we didn’t have any knowledge of, so we ended up trolling the world out of that section. Overall, my partner and I felt ok about the test, and so did serenaz26 and JC. The test itself was horrible. Some diagrams had unreadable scales, then proceeded to ask us “Based on the scale, how long is ___?” However, I’m pretty sure that all of the people had no idea what was going on, and my ability to read tiny text came in clutch (I (I think) correctly found that it was 200 micrometers). Every time we asked our ES what ___ was because it was unreadable, the ES responded with “I didn’t write this test. We’ll fix it later.” (Funnily enough, the ES helped out with WiFi Lab last year, and I thought that was weird because switching from physics to biology is wild).

Then came my break block. I didn’t have an event this block (thankfully), so I just chilled with speedyfalcon. I ended up bringing a Hi-Chew frisbee because I knew that I would get bored during the break block. speedyfalcon and I ended up going to the front entrance to play some frisbee. It was really funny since I sucked and speedyfalcon ended up being a tad worse than I. We made so many jokes about our skills, such as “Average math main moment,” and “OMG a math main touching grass!” We missed most of our throws, and eventually, our hands both got too cold, and we went back inside. After going back inside, speedyfalcon, VL (Same from district band), NR, and I played Scum (or President), and we finished a couple of rounds before the third block arrived.

My third block was Codebusters. I wasn’t very worried about this event, since it wasn’t my main focus, and I also knew that Varsity was going to beat us regardless (I’m JV1, and I had hope that we were going to beat Varsity in Microbe Mission). Nonetheless, I still tried in the event, and we got the timed question relatively slowly, but it was alright. I tried solving both cryptarithms, and I had decoded “Western” for the second cryptarithm before time ran out, which got me extremely angry because I just needed 30 more seconds. Now I know how brianzjk felt at CarSO last year. After discussing with the JV2s, I had a bad feeling that they might have actually beaten us, since they had gotten two bonus questions, whereas we had only gotten 1, giving them an approximately 350-point advantage over us, not including some other questions.

Lunch was quite… interesting. After eating lunch, I went outside to the soccer field with WFeng, speedyfalcon, LL, MS, NR, MM, and some others who I’m forgetting to play ultimate frisbee. We ended up sucking, dropping an atrocious number of passes, and throwing some absolutely horrendous passes as well. After a little bit, teams were deemed unfair, so the match turned into Varsities + speedyfalcon vs JVs. The JVs ended up winning 2-1 after I caught a really nice throw by I forget who. WFeng ended up missing a catch, and he proceeded to roll around on the dead grass and lie there for a good 30 seconds, which was really funny. At this point, I was extremely dehydrated and tired, and my stomach hurt a bit from exercising right after eating.

After talking to aunicorn, giving her and her friend some cookies, as well as talking to PotatoMathster about her events (the conversation literally went like “Hey PotatoMathster how’d you do? “Which event?” “All of them.” *gets thumbs-up from PotatoMathster along with a smile). I also met VG during Microbe Mission and our homebase, as we hadn’t seen or talked to each other in approximately a year. It took so long for the award ceremony to start, so in the meantime, I watched Bluedevils play Minecraft (It took him 10 minutes to find one buried treasure chest), and responded to some discord texts, including one from an ADHS person who, unfortunately, I never got to meet.

Finally, awards! I ended up getting first in both Microbe Mission and Codebusters (How did we even beat JV2 in Codebusters haha), which was really nice. Enloe as a whole swept through Regionals, getting first and second in the JV category, and first in the Varsity category. After looking through the unified results (JV + Varsity combined results), I found out that I had actually beaten serenaz26 and JC (who is a USABO finalist), which made me very happy (though I’m pretty sure that it was by tiebreaker). Funnily enough, Enloe JV1 beat NCSSM Varsity in unified results, which means that the future is bright hopeful for Enloe (though I think that half of Enloe Varsity/JV1 will be leaving for SSM come next year). During awards, I remember screaming “GO BRANDON WOOO” really loudly (the person to my left complained that I was too loud) because he got 6th in flight with a 4.5-second in-flight time haha.

After the award ceremony, I realized that I had left my jacket! While looking in the gym, where results were held, I literally didn’t find anything, and I didn’t see it in the cafeteria either. I ended up getting really scared, because my Enloe Swim and Dive hoodie is quite precious to me, and my coach ended up taking it and gave to someone, who then returned it to me after I had panicked for a good 5 minutes. Oops.