Science Olympiad Team Structures

In a series of posts, I am going to highlight different team structures for Science Olympiad teams.

My team is a middle school team at a small Catholic elementary school which is located in a affluent suburban city in Northeast Ohio.  This team is managed and coached by parents.  When the team started, we would meet on Saturday mornings at the school.  We would try to rotate through all 23 events over a two week period.  Most of the building events would meet in someone's basement or workshop at a different time.  I coached about 7 events and a few other parents would coach 2 or 3 events.  The rest of the events were covered by other parents that each coached 1 event.

This year, our whole team will meet on Fridays after school once a month for team bonding and cover general competition strategies.  The individual events will meet at different times based on the coach's availability and student extra-curricular schedules.  We do not have any restrictions on student participation in additional extracurriculars and we try to work around the winter basketball season.  Every student that wants to be on the team is welcome.  We usually have between 15-20 students on the team and the younger students take turns as alternates.  Some years we have 8th graders that graduated come back to the team as a 9th grader, but not always.

In Northeast Ohio, we are fortunate to have many invitational competitions within a one hour drive.  This year, we plan to attend 5 invitational competitions before heading to our regional competition.  The invitational competitions are a great way for our students to test their building event devices and get constructive advice from event judges.  It is also a great way for new students to learn about the structure of the competition. 

We also try to periodically have family potluck dinners to provide students and parents a chance to get to know one another.  A highlight of the year is when(if) we go to the State Competition.  The students are dismissed from school mid-day on Friday so we can travel to the State Competition at The Ohio State University.  Each family makes their own travel arrangements and hotel reservations, and we usually all stay at the same hotel. The night before the competition, most of the families go to a video game / bar and grill type of place.  We all have dinner, play video games and win tickets for silly prizes.  Then we head back to the hotel and try to get to sleep at a reasonable hour.  The next morning, we are full of excitement as we head to campus for the beginning of the competition.  After a long day of walking across The Ohio State campus multiple times, we usually have dinner together while we wait for the award ceremony.  We all have many fond memories of our trips to the State Competition.  I hope we are able to go again this year.