Academic Decathlon moves on to states

Isaac Gall, Photographer

With BHS students’ great performance and great coaching, the ACDEC team will compete in a statewide tournament on March 3. To advance to the state tournament, Bellefonte had to compete at their highest level in the competitions leading up to now.

The ACDEC club is a group of high school students who compete in academic competitions against other teams around the state. There are different events that the students can compete in, such as speech, interview, essays, tests of knowledge, and the super quiz, which is when contestants take turns answering challenging multiple-choice questions in front of a live audience.

Some of the BHS students on the ACDEC team have very high expectations for states and know that they will have to compete at their highest level if they want to win. Junior Grady Garrison believes they’ll be able to do this if they stay focused. 

“As long as my team and I keep competing how we have been I think we will do really good at states and hopefully place,” he said. 

Although the students on ACDEC have high expectations at states, their coach, English teacher Ms. Kat Momenzadeh thinks a little bit differently and thinks that some of the teams they will have to go against outclass the Bellefonte ACDEC team.

“I feel like we are a little bit outclassed as a team, but I would be happy if we finished with about five metals,” she said. 

Unfortunately, the Bellefonte ACDEC team will have to compete through states without one of their top scorers, junior Collin Sharp. Even though Collin will not be able to compete at states, he has still enjoyed competing for Bellefonte.

“Two of my favorite parts about our last competition to get to states were one, I was happy to finish all of the tests in the required time, and two, I won a sweet trophy that made this experience completely worth it,” he said. 

Best of luck to our Bellefonte ACDEC team while they compete at states and try their best to bring a first-place trophy back to our school.