December 3, 2011

Thunder Faithful...

A long, uneventful, 10 hour bus ride culminated in our awesome dinner at Gino's East Pizza last night.  Students were commended by hotel staff for being better than other groups that come through.  A shaky start this morning with the town we had to drive through took about 30 minutes to go 7 miles with lights, trains, and train tracks led to our kids being a little rattled and rushed to get the day started, but we recovered.  It has been a long day with many disappointed faces and stories to match, but I sit here waiting for the awards to start and know we've got a few things coming to us at least!  The top few teams in Illinois and several top Indiana teams are here with us, so we are seeing some new and stiff competition.

The top finishers for St. James today were...

Fermi: 3rd place: Tim Hendricks and Eric Zheng AND 4th place: George Rhodes and Jake Grube
Forensics: 3rd place: Tina Keehn and Rebecca Thornton
Gravity Vehicle: 1st place: Brian Buechler and Cody Hearn
Helicopter: 5th place: Cody Hearn and Brad Peterson
Optics: 6th place: Brian Buechler and Tim Hendricks
Protein Modeling: 1st place: Libby Grube, Ian Garnett, and Eric Zheng
Remote Sensing: 3rd place: Sean Clary and Cody Hearn
Robot Arm: 5th place: Sean Clary and Cody Hearn AND 6th place: Jonathan Mauro and Drew McKee
Sounds of Music: 4th place: Sean Clary and Libby Grube
Thermodynamics: 2nd place: Cody Hearn and Tim Hendricks

We placed 5th and are bringing home a plaque!  Our JV team finished 7th in the field of JV's and beat 6 varsity teams as well.  Considering the intensity of the teams here, I am pretty pleased with our results. Congratulate them as they return!  Next up...Excelsior Springs on December 17th.  Prayers for safe travels home tomorrow...it looks wet!

Jeremy Way