This past week the HHS ACES team competed at Carterville High School for regionals.  Leading up to the competition I asked both the coach and some of the competitors how they felt about the upcoming competition.  

When I interviewed Mrs. Bonifield I asked her how confident she was in her team’s ability to be able to win it all at this competition and she had this to say: “We won the regional competition last year so I have high hopes for this year.”  

Vince Champion who is one of the team members on ACES shared a similar opinion with Mrs. Bonifield.  “We won the regional last year and we’re gonna go for the two in a row this year.”  There were a total of 5 schools competing in the tournament.  

Both Mrs. Bonifield as well as most of the ACES team believed that their biggest competition was going to be Carterville.  Overall, the team was very confident in the days leading up to the meet.  Once the whole competition was all said and done our team ended up doing extremely well!  Sadly the team did not get first place as they had hoped but they did place in second and are going to advance to the sectional at SIU in March.  

In terms of individual awards the team also did extremely well.  Nathan Abba placed 1st in physics and Vince Champion also placed first in math.  The team also had some second-place finishes such as John Braid in physics and Joshua Jones in computer science.  The team also had numerous third place finishes as well.  Coming out of the competition the team is pretty happy with how they did overall.  Although they are disappointed that they were not able to get first place they are still happy with how they did; especially individually.