For many years, Regionals meant the last competition the RHS Academic Decathlon Team participated in for that year. This year, however, was not like any other.

Nine students suited up and began to leave the room assigned to RHS. The RHS team was scheduled to be the first to take the interview portion of the Academic Decathlon Regional competition.

Thirty minutes later, they were once again marching out of the RHS classroom to give their 4-minute-speech to three judges.

With all team members scoring above an 800/1000, Day One came to end.

Day Two of the competition consisted of seven 30-minute tests, separated by one hour for lunch and two 15-minute breaks for cramming. Later came Super Quiz where each member competes in one round, compromised of six questions on any of the seven Academic Decathlon subjects.

As the decathletes took tests, the two RHS coaches were regularly checking the team’s score, and for both days of the competition, RHS was ranked fourth, in a highly competitive region.

By the time the award ceremony ended, RHS placed third, beating all other RISD high schools and all Plano ISD schools. RHS was also the 10^th highest scoring team in the state, scoring 42,252. With this young success, RHS also qualifies for State competition.

“All the hard work and effort started in April culminated in the success we achieved at Regional’s, and because we came together with a common goal, we were able to show our competition what RHS can be,” Marin Young said.

Individual winners are listed below.

Hannah Born (Varsity level) placed:

1^st– Art

Olga Matveeva (Scholastic level) placed:

5^th-All Around

1^st -Speech

Marin Young (Honors level) placed:

2^nd-All Around

3^rd– Math

3^rd-Music

2^nd-Economics

2^nd-Science