The middle and high school Science Olympiad teams placed second at the state championship at Wichita State Saturday.
Coach Barbie Grado said she is proud of how both teams did. The high school team had a lot of new kids this year, so the way they performed at state impressed her, she said. Both teams showed perseverance and grit, she said.
“For this being the first state competition for a lot of kids on both the middle and the high school teams, that’s pretty good,” she said.
Eudora competed against 25 other schools in the small schools category, some of which were 5A schools. There were 15 team members competing on each team.
Several kids didn’t get to Wichita until midnight Friday because of other sports and were exhausted, but got up and did the best they could Saturday, she said.
“They were really wanting that first place, but we’ll take second place,” she said.
The high school placed first the last four years.
Senior Nate Steinlage has been on the team for eight years, and Saturday was the closure to his high school career on the team.
“It feels really good. I wish we could have got away with the 5-peat but I know that all my teammates will have a little bit in their gut and hopefully next year they can get it and I can watch them from the sidelines,” he said.
Getting to have fun with his teammates has been the best part, he said. Even after the events are done, they’re hanging out and spending time together.
He feels good about his performance, he said, and he felt confident going into Saturday’s competition.
“I knew that all my teammates were very strong in all their events, and I had a lot of confidence in them,” he said.
A lot of his past partners graduated in 2024. The team knew this year might be a rebuilding year, and many team members stepped up, he said. The team has a significant number of underclassmen on it, so to get these results already is good, he said.
Steinlage participated in helicopter, experimental design, air trajectory and code busters.
Sophomore Lizzie Baker participated in geomapping and fossils at state.
Some of the test questions were not what she was expecting, but she did what she could and felt good about it, she said.
“I mean, I always just try to think of everything as the best, so I can try and be the most confident in it as I can because if I’m confident in it, then I’ll perform better, but yeah, I think I was pretty confident,” she said.
This was the first year on the team for seventh graders Lyla Oller and Idella Castro. They agreed the middle school team did well and said they owe that to the help of their teammates and coaches.
Eighth grader Aubriella Curnes has been on the team for three years. She competed in microbe mission, metric mastery, disease detectives, meteorology, scrambler and experimental design.
She said it’s really hard to place at state, so to place multiple times feels good. She was nervous going into the day, but she felt confident at the same time.
Getting to state was possible by “going up against hard competition,” and “studying and practicing a lot.”
Additional reporting by Annalynn Phanthadeth
