Fossil Ridge High School’s Science Olympiad team journeyed to Menomonie, Wisconsin over the weekend of May 21 for the National Competition. Over 50 teams competed from high schools all across the country, including a team from Japan. In order to participate in the competition, Fossil’s team had to win the State competition, where their top three teams placed first, second, and fourth overall. Chelsea Wang, a sophomore, said, “It was a lot of fun because our team did really well and I enjoyed getting to know the rest of the team much better.”

Individually, seniors Kristine Johnson, Alexa Smith, and Natalie Spencer placed fifth in Experimental Design, where the participants are given many materials that they have to perform specific experiments on, and then complete a lab write-up for the judging. Sophomores Kyle Schmer and Trevor Long placed fifth in Electric Vehicle, an event that involves building and testing a vehicle that can travel a given distance in the shortest amount of time. Overall, the Science Olympiad team placed seventeenth in the nation. Melissa Vigil, one of the coaches for the team, says it’s “pretty incredible” that the team improved from getting seventeenth in the regional competition to seventeenth in the nationals competition in just six years. Fossil also received the Dupont Team Enterprise Award, which is given to a team that did not participate in the national competition the previous year; eighteen other high schools qualified.