The school’s Academic Team placed first in the season, but fifth in the championship round on Monday night at Viera School Board.

“We really screwed up in the championship match,” senior Anna Feldbush said. “We just kind of had an off night.”

The rounds go by points. The first round is awarded five points, the next round 10 points and the final round 15 points.

“If you get one question wrong,” Feldbush said. “It can put you three places down in the room. One of the big questions that came up championship night was a simple biology question and of course the biology teacher is the coach. We were all afraid to answer because we either didn’t want to get it wrong or it sounded too simple of an answer.”

Angela Feldbush is the coach for the Academic Team and the biology teacher.

“They asked where pre-RNA is converted into MRNA, in what organelle,” Angela Feldbush said. “The answer was nucleus, which everybody knew, but they didn’t think that the answer could be that easy, so nobody buzzed in. When biology questions do come up I get a little emotional because most of the kids had me for bio or AP Bio. I feel like they should know it, but they know a lot of stuff that I don’t know.”

Another problem the team faced was team chemistry.

“We have a bunch of people who are puppy fighting to prove who’s the smartest,” Anna Feldbush said. “I think that we need to work on team chemistry a lot.”

West Shore also has a reputation of never surrendering.

“You have a minute for each question and if nobody knows the answer, you can wave a white piece of paper to surrender for the question, so even if you accidentally buzz in, it doesn’t count for anything,” Anna Feldbush said. “We have a tradition of never surrendering because we don’t like to admit we don’t know anything, so it annoys the other teams because it will add like five minutes on to the game time. Point wise and accuracy wise we killed it [this season]. We had games with 100 percent accuracy and most nights we had over 200 points.”

Viorel Silaghi (11), Mircea Silaghi (10), and Kishen Mitra (10) will compete at states on April 19-21. There will be practices held every other Monday with the students from the other schools as a team until competition day.

By Dhanvi Patel