I feel as if this is kind of unfair to Clements. A lot more goes on than just a sub par performance in a couple of events and I feel that putting it that way does not do justice to the amount of work that the students there must have put in. Events do not go perfectly as planned and especially in buildin and lab events, there are a lot of things that are out of the students' control.UnprunedShrub wrote:...it seems that subpar performances in scrambler and chem lab led to Clements's 3rd place performance. Scrambler is an event that can easily go wrong, so we can cut them slack on that, but they really needed to place on chem lab since Seven Lakes and LASA took 1 and 2. LASA won first due to an outstanding all-round performance, and Seven Lakes deservedly took the 2nd place spot due to a more consistent performance than Clements.
I was a member of the beckendorff state team that won second place last year at state and I can confirm that the feeling is terrible. Regardless of the scores that you got, there is still a small part of you that says "what if I didn't mess up in rotor egg drop and got 2nd instead of 3rd? What if I didn't mess up in experimental design and got 3rd instead of fourth? Maybe I'm the reason we failed". I can only imagine how the students at Clements must feel, as they were unlucky enough so that they will not be going to nationals while we still got a second chance.
I feel that now, after state, we should just congratulate all of the teams that participated and wish the two teams that will be going to nationals good luck. I get the feeling that Clements will come back next year in the same way that lasa did and that once again, division C is going to be a bloodbath where only two of three very deserving teams get to go to nationals. Although I am near certain this will never happen, I hope that Science Olympiad changes so that outcomes like this (and stuff like this likely happens in other competitive state like Ohio and Illinois) are minimized. All three of the top teams at Texas would likely place very highly at nationals.
On a more happy note, congratulations to Cinco Ranch JHS for winning second place and coming to nationals.