The Scholars Bowl season came to an end as varsity members headed to Bluestem for the regionals meet Feb. 4. This is the first time that varsity players got to compete in an in-person meet this year, making it an important meet.

The members on the varsity team that participated in the meet were seniors Owen Balman, Lucy Boyles, Marques Coursey, Isaac Meyers, Rylie Thompson and Sadie Schmanke.

“I am feeling confident that our team will perform well enough on our standards,” Coursey said. “I excel in the science category, so I hope some of the questions revolve around that.”

In past regional Scholars Bowl meets, there was a maximum of 12 teams. The pandemic has restricted the amount of people to be gathered in one place so not all of the schools in the regional were able to compete. This meant that only the top two teams, instead of the top four, would advance into state.

“I’m not too optimistic, but I think we have a good chance in terms of performance,” said Boyles. “I feel like there’s room for error and communication when it comes to the virtual meets, so I definitely prefer the in-person meets, and I’m glad to participate in at least one this year.”

This season was quite limited in terms of how many meets there were to attend. Most of the season consisted of virtual meets to eliminate the risk of potentially spreading the virus. The only pros to this were that teams were able to converse with each other about their answers without other teams able to hear them. However, many cons came with this, including how the technology was difficult to handle to make the meets possible, as well as not having the experience of attending in person.

“Now that I have been that coach for a year, I feel more comfortable taking on the role and have learned a lot,” said coach Kristy Martin. “Having to participate in the virtual meets was difficult at first because it is not the norm for this activity. We have a good lineup of team members this season, and I am hoping that we have a good future with the freshman, sophomores, and other upcoming students.”

The Scholars Bowl regionals team won three out of the seven games and got fifth out of all the teams and won’t be moving on to state.