Marmion achieves national success at academic bowl

They are the champions.

The Marmion Academy's JROTC academic team recently returned from the championship round of the College Options Foundation's JROTC Leadership and Academic Bowl at George Mason University in Washington, D.C.

The five-person team, including Edward Malnar of LaFox, Spencer Buyansky of Yorkville, Mitchell Heaton Tom Pacer of Batavia, and John Rios of North Aurora, competed alongside 23 other JROTC teams to advance to the finals, and made it past 12 other teams to win the championship.

The bowl, held June 25 to 29, is a nationally-recognized academic competition created exclusively for JROTC students.

The competition emulated a Jeopardy-style competition, and challenged each participant with ACT- and SAT-type questions, including math, science and English.

Major Mark Emerson, academic team adviser, said the team initially competed in two rounds of online play against 1,109 high schools across the nation.

Competitors who made it to the second round achieved the top 50 percent of the overall scores. To make it to the final round, competitors had to place first in their brigade, which is determined on geographical location in the country. Marmion's brigade consisted of 120 teams.

"Initially, we were going for a raw score. We happened to get a 98 out of 100, which is good, but one can never be assured that the score will qualify them for the finals. As luck would have it, it did," Emerson said.

"They (the students) and I were extremely happy. This was the first time we won our brigade, and we have never been to the finals before, so we really didn't know what to expect," he added.

Emerson said training for the competition was exceptionally difficult, due to the inability to focus on one particular area.

"These kids are already trained in the ACT- and SAT-type questions, but it just goes to credit the quality teaching staff at Marmion," he said.

The final rounds were formatted into a four-quarter, categorized tournament, where each round's point value differed and teams relied on luck when choosing the categories for both their and the opponent teams.

The Marmion team went undefeated in the preliminary final rounds, averaging 303 points to the competitors' 130 points, which earned them the top seed in the championship bracket.

Emerson said he and the team knew they had won with three questions left in the final quarter of the final match. The winning question related to gerrymandering.

"The kids and the school are thrilled about this victory. Of course, since we're on vacation, those who have heard about the success are thrilled to death. It's great for the school and our program couldn't be in a better environment," he said.