Scioly.org

The size of the team relative to the school as well as its results both impact this. Generally, I'm fine with not being in the spotlight much so long as the school is the team's litter box. The more restrictive building use policies and related things are, the harder team operations become. At the B level, while there are a lot of students who want nothing to do with SO, many do take a passing interest in what the SO team does. As long as you don't start going off about Water Quality or another equally boring event (to someone who isn't a science nerd, of course), I'm sure you could make SO sound pretty cool to outsiders. Everyone enjoys watching aviation events.

The best team-school connection I've ever had was an assembly just for the SO team's results. We have a banner now hanging forever in our MPR that was dedicated then, and there's also one in a local food joint. And, speaking of the community, I've got three road signs back in the same town that I can boast 'I coached that team!' for. Nobody but me really cares , but, hey...

Following that last thought, I like to think of it like we should all consider ourselves privileged to be or have been involved with a program like SO despite, perhaps, having minimal attention and ambivalence from the rest of the school. Not very many people have that privilege, after all! The high school I graduated from is fifteen out of about fifteen hundred. Ergo, the SO team at that school truly is the 1% .

At my school...
First, it has really become as much of a community effort as school "club." All of our coaches are parents, with the exception of the head coach (physics teacher). This perpetuates outside support plus the parents (who have a loader polictical voice) can often drive internal change at school. We have our own trophy case area and our announcement after invitationals, etc go hand in hand with the basketball and wrestling scores. Also, are school has had lots of success which now makes it more popular to be a part of.

At our invitational last year I witnessed a real cool thing. It was an B/C combined event and several of the building events were going on in our auxillary gym. The basketball team (state ranked at the time) was coming out to practice in main gym when the all stopped and watched for several minutes. You heard them say "cool" "look at that" and were pointing out to each other all the interesting thing (Egg Drop, Boom, etc). Later that week, one of my hoopster classmates (who rarely speaks to me) told me how awesome he thought science olympiad was. So now, I have a few coaches that I know as teachers and I have been encouraging them to invite their athletes to attend our invitational in two weeks as a sign of student unity. I tell them, "we come to all the football and basketball games, wouldn't in be cool to see some of them support us?" Anyway, SO kind of like running cross country, I do it for the challenge and the shared love of the sciences. Peace out!

UQOnyx wrote:Our coaches are very dedicated to science Olympiad. Our whole school is just there because of teachers who are extremely dedicated and concerned for the students. We have a whole bunch of coaches, literally whoever is the most specialized in the school at the event. Since we have no government funding as we are a small private school, we have to buy all the material other than the rule books and official materials. We have to buy our own material for all building events which is a HUGE pain for us building event people, but there is nothing we can do..

AND I just realized who isis2014. We go to the same school and right now I feel like a genius.

Yup GENIUS

we have this amazing principal at our school who literally knows nothing about our club, our coaches our nice and supportive but the rest of the administration couldn't care less about our club.

We have a team that meets two afternoons a week and every Saturday. No one really knows about our club

It used to be much more involved in the past with top notch teams barely missing nationals consistently getting in the top 3 at states...

The club doesn't get funding like it used to in the past, it isn't as competitive anymore, and only 1 coach compared to multiple in the past is willing to simply put time (more as an opening room and attending the competition basis).

It surprised me that Science Olympiad was mentioned in my class's graduation speech (as activities students would spend their time on) and once by the principal during that ceremony, probably to some extent due to the past's influence. It didn't get much otherwise attention from my graduating class as I was the only member of the C/O 2013 in it, and I didn't win the science department award (they won't give two different department awards to one person)...

On a better light, it currently looks like a new team that is getting better again (we've dipped to a low of 9th place at regionals in the past few years), just that the team is missing a lot of the really good students on campus who are busy in their own extracurriculars or GPA/SAT efforts. There's a good chance that the team can make states this year, or else as my college schedule gets busier / the teammates I used to work with graduate in the upcoming years, I'll have less time to devote towards my Science Olympiad team...

Our team seems to be very different from what i'm seeing here. Our head coach writes up a schedule for hour long periods with the coaches for the individual events. We have two of these periods a day, monday through thursday, and then a specifically engineering day on friday with weekend build-it days every couple of weeks. We have two teams, both of about 15 people, and the teams don't really segregate at all until the regionals. We even have a room in the school designated specifically for SO engineering, and nothing else. We have gone to the state competition for the last 21 years iirc. Almost seems like we're the odd ones out Our school always has banners and stuff wishing us well in the competitions and we have never really had any issues with being classified as "the nerds" since that would hardly describe most people on our teams. Well, maybe the freshmen, but what are you gonna do? They're hopeless.

I think the school and most of the teachers are very supportive of the science olympiad program. We have several teachers as coaches and event mentors, and many others are willing to share supplies or provide a space to work. It's really nice, honestly. We're kind of just nerds to most of the other students, but hey- I don't think the word is taken too seriously. Most of us admit to it proudly, you know?

Tomorrow we get to walk around the school for a clap out since we qualified for states!

Half our school joined at the beginning of this school year.