It’s all academic for Sawyer Rudy.
“Celebrating this, as we celebrate sports, brings awareness to academics,” the student at Morgantown High School said.
“And,” he continued, “it encourages other students to join academic events.”
Let it be known that as he was saying that, he was also hoisting the trophy that had just been presented to him and his MHS teammates Preston Hetrick, Julia Oliverio, Agatha Dahle and Logan Ross earlier this week in Charleston.
Sawyer is captain of the team that took it all in the 2024 Academic Showdown, an Olympics of intellect, as it were, that the West Virginia Department of Education has hosted for the past two years.
A team from Bluefield High School in Mercer County was the runner-up in the showdown.
The first rounds of the competition began in January on college campuses across West Virginia, with it all coming down to the championship round Tuesday on the stage of the state Culture Center.
WVU and Fairmont State University were stops on the tour.
“It has been a thrill to watch,” state Schools Superintendent Michelle L. Blatt said.
Twenty-one teams entered the intellectual fray during the competition’s inaugural rounds in 2022.
That grew to 71 teams last year.
This year was the largest brain-bracket yet.
More than 90 teams, from 50 high schools across 31 counties, all went forth in the 2024 competition, that, as Sawyer said and the superintendent echoed, is a state tournament of the decidedly different kind.
Two teams were fielded this year by Morgantown High.
“The excitement continues to grow,” Blatt said.
“Some of the scholars have competed every year because this program challenges them with rigorous competition.”
Teams take on questions from molecular biology to world politics in the quiz bowl-styled rounds that went from molecular biology to world politics and pop culture — and in no particular order.
There were all the trappings of those other state tournaments in Charleston, too, with cheerleaders, a live pep band and an audience not shy about whooping and clapping.
Microsoft doled out cash money for the day.
Team members on MHS’s winning team each pocketed $2,000 in prize money. Bluefield High’s team members each earned $1,000 for their work.
The members of Wheeling Park’s team from Ohio County received $750 apiece for their third-place showing.
Meanwhile, Morgantown High was also represented on the Academic Showdown’s all-tournament team, with Sawyer being named along with Steven Tian, from MHS Team 2.
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