Sparta Middle School team brings home trophy
HARDYSTON. A Sparta team wins the Sussex County Academic Bowl for the first time since 2016.
Sparta /
| 06 May 2023 | 08:27
From left are members of the winning Sparta Middle School team: Charles Scholl, Jake Hamilton, Logan Fadil, Victoria Tynes and Sara Schwarz.
Clockwise are Jake Hamilton, Charles Scholl, Victoria Tynes, Sara Schwarz and Logan Fadil during the collaborative round of the competition.
From left are Jason Kopp, Logan Fadil, Sergey Gekht, Josh Wright, Abigail Juan, Victoria Tynes, Sara Schwarz, Charles Scholl, Jake Hamilton, Ajay Persaud, Michael Iudica and Robert Gilmartin.
Sparta Middle School seventh- and eighth-graders recently competed in the Sussex County Academic Bowl, held annually at Hardyston Middle School.
The competition last was held in 2019; it was canceled for the past three years because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Academic Bowl is a day-long trivia competition, in which teams of up to five students (four students and one alternate) from one school compete in a head-to-head round against a team from another school.
Forty questions are attempted in an 18-minute round.
The teams earn points for their score that round and an additional point for winning the match-up.
The head-to-head contests take place throughout the day, rotating match-ups with other schools. In one round during the day, each team works collaboratively to answer as many of the 50 questions in a given packet as they can.
“While the entire competition is exciting, this collaborative round offers something different. It gives you an opportunity to see these five students work together towards a common goal,” said Jason Kopp, adviser to the Sparta Middle School Academic Team.
“Their strategies may differ but their camaraderie really shines through.”
The top four teams return to Hardyston Middle School for the evening portion of the competition. The teams in third and fourth place compete for 3rd place, and the teams in first and second place compete for the championship.
While the Spartans have made it to the evening competition each year since 2016, this was the first year since then that they achieved their goal of bringing the trophy back to Sparta.
“I couldn’t be more proud of this group,” Kopp said. “These students were so driven to succeed but competed with such humility and joy. It’s been such a pleasure to work with some of these students for the entire three years of their middle school experience, while I look forward to our seventh-graders competing again next year.”
Members of the winning team were eighth-graders Logan Fadil, Sara Schwarz and Victoria Tynes and seventh-graders Jake Hamilton and Charles Scholl.
Sergey Gekht, Michael Iudica, Abigail Juan, Ajay Persaud and Josh Wright also took part in the competition.