The Niles West Science Olympiad team competed at the Loyola Invitational on February 23, coming in at 8th place for the varsity and 11th place for the junior varsity. Additionally, the team won the Spirit Award, which is given to the team that displays the most positivity and team spirit.

Coach Elizabeth Ramseyer believes the team competed well at the tournament, especially considering the high level of competition at the meet. Also, she feels the team has a good chance of making it to state.

“Very well. Better than in most years at the Loyola tournament. I don’t want to say it was surprising, we have very talented people, and everyone was on their A-game,” Ramseyer said. “Eleven of our events placed in the top ten, and about three of them just missed a medal. It seems there is some room for improvement which makes it look even better for state. I don’t want say the word state, but I feel like we’ll get one of the three bids for regionals.”

Senior Alexia Popescu, who came in 4th place for the event Circuit Lab, hopes to continue working hard to place well in the regional tournament to get a bid for state.

“I plan to keep up the good work for all my events, hopefully, medal higher for circuit lab since we’ve really been focusing in on mastering new challenging concepts. As a team, I see our goal at regionals to place either first or second for total school score in order to qualify for state. If we put in the work now, I think we can definitely do it,” senior Popescu said. 

Senior Muhammad Afzal thinks the team beat their own expectations and has a very good chance of qualifying for the state tournament.

“I think overall the team did great, we got lots of medals compared to what we were thought we were going to get,” Afzal said. ‘We got two first places in two events, which is remarkable considering where the competition we were at, which is a very difficult competition. We have a lot of work to do, but we can get there. I’m pretty sure we’re going to get to state, we have three bids at out regional, and we can definitely get in the top three places at regionals.”