Oceans Bowl 2018

I always had wanted to do science bowl, but I never saw the appeal. But my senior year in high school one of my friends wanted me to join their Ocean Bowl team since they didn’t have enough people to field a team. So there I was every Tuesday and Thursday night spending my time in a classroom learning all about the Ocean as I could. I fell in love with it! It was super cool. After a couple of weeks of training we headed out to Corvallis, OR to compete in the NW regionals for Ocean Bowl and this is my experience!

Arrival

We flew to Portland and then our team rented a big van to take all the way to Corvallis, OR which was a hour to two hour drive. We stayed in a hotel close to the Oregon State University campus where the actual Ocean Bowl competition was going to take place. On the arrival day we had a short orientation with all the teams and a tour of OSU’s science buildings which was followed by a very fun bowling activity! But this was all in good fun and our whole team knew the the REAL fun was going to happen tomorrow.

Game Time

Since our team was decently big, we had two teams that were in the competition. I was on the Boise High B team. The competition had a group stage and then there was a bracket system after you played four matches. We went 3-1 in the group stage! The A team (somehow) actually lost all four of their matches and they were eliminated! This was crazy since now we were the new A team! We somehow won two more games and qualified to compete for third place!

Conclusion

It was riveting but we won our third place round and took third at regionals! It was kind of amazing. We came into the place not knowing if we would even win one match, but we beat the A team and took third place at regionals! This experience was a big reason why I took oceans as a class.