River Hill High School

River Hill High School is a predominantly student-run Division C team from Clarksville, Maryland, and is part of the Howard County Public School System. River Hill qualified for the 2010 National Competition following their success at the 2010 Maryland Tournament, defeating the previous two-time champion Walter Johnson High School. They placed 29th overall and medaled in 3 events: 2nd place in Environmental Chemistry, 5th place in Mousetrap Vehicle, and 4th place in Trajectory. River Hill has experienced success at the Maryland State Tournament, most recently placing 2nd overall in 2019. River Hill has a long-time rivalry with Centennial High School, and just fell 2nd to them in the 2019 Maryland State Tournament, but are determined to keep fighting in the 2019-2020 season.

2017-2018
In the 2018 season, River Hill experienced moderate success, placing 3rd overall at the Central Maryland Regional Tournament, and going on to place 3rd at the Maryland State Tournament. We did not progress to the Nationals Tournament, much to the dismay of our members. We're determined to turn this dismal performance around in the 2018-2019 season, so watch out, @Centennial High School (Maryland) :)

3rd at Central MD regionals but we beat Resi soooooo...

I ran 2 miles uphill both ways to buy bubble tea for the team while it was raining and got locked out of homeroom

2018-2019
Update 11.11.2018:

We're currently in the phase of team placement testing, so logistics are in the works for the moment. There's a surprising amount of interest in Science Olympiad at our school, although we did have some difficulties finding a teacher sponsor. Aside from this, we're expected to attend the National Cathedral Invitational in December 2018, and more notably the Princeton Invitational in early 2019. We're hoping to finally defeat our long-time opponent, Centennial High School, at 2019 Maryland States. We'll see you all at Cornell!

Update 12.08.2018:

We've just got back from the National Cathedral Invitational, and we are extremely pleased with our results. Our varsity team earned an overall ranking of 2nd, including gold medals in Protein Modeling, Codebusters, Wright Stuff, Chemistry Lab, and Designer Genes. This is a large improvement from last year, considering that we succeeded against multiple teams that we had previous lost to at the Fairfax Invitational in the 2018 season. We are all very proud of our results as a team, and we will continue to grow through steady improvement and long hours of hard grinding. Our journey to Nationals is looking up, this could possibly be our year!

Update 01.18.2019:

Things are looking up! We won 2nd overall out of 60 teams (including state champions and other Nationals contenders) at the Fairfax Invitational, but we trailed 33 points behind our long-time rival and Maryland state champion Centennial High School. We placed in 12 of the 23 events, including 1st place finishes in Anatomy, Circuit Lab, Designer Genes, and Protein Modeling. This is an insane improvement from last year, as we placed 12th overall in the same competition previously. We're looking forward to competing at the Princeton Invitational next month, and face off against some nationally-acclaimed teams. We'll update again after Princeton, and continue on the train of documenting our hard-fought journey to Nationals.

Update 03.31.2019:

It's been a while since I've updated this page, and I'm sorry. Quite a bit has happened between the last update and now, so I'll try to cover it quickly. We attended the 2019 Princeton Invitational, even though it was a 6-hour bus ride round trip with 2 other teams in our area. We ended up placing 13th overall amongst many nationally acclaimed teams, such as West-Windsor Plainsboro, Montgomery, and Rustin. We placed 3rd in Science Word (trial), 4th in Disease Detectives, Protein Modeling, and Fermi Questions, 5th in Anatomy & Physiology, and 6th in Mousetrap Vehicle and Designer Genes. This was a big accomplishment for us because we didn't place in any events the previous years we'd gone to this same competition. We were insanely proud of what we'd achieved, and the progress we'd made. Of course, Centennial (our rival) beat us by approximately 20 points, which placed them 9th overall. However, this encouraged many team members, seeing how close the gap was between us and the nationals spot. The next week, we'd attend Central Maryland Regionals, only to get our ass kicked by Centennial and another team in the state, Richard Montgomery. We missed 2nd place by 2 points, but the gap between us and Centennial was as large as ever. This was a very poorly run competition, in our opinion, because they removed 3 events from the final scoring, which would have made a large difference in deciding the top performing teams. Additionally, this regional competition was held at a local high school instead of the University of Maryland, as it had been held in years past. This performance was especially disheartening, especially since we saw Centennial as our only competition, and failed to acknowledge other potential competitors (such as Richard Montgomery). This competition also motivated us to try to fix our Boomilever, as it had been consistently been performing dismally, and was a source of many extra points added to our final score. We would end up grinding until the Maryland States Competition, which was just yesterday (March 30, 2019). As you can probably tell from our score table, we didn't make Nationals this year. We were 34 points away from beating Centennial, and we got 2nd place overall. There was a large gap between us and the 3rd place competitor, so we did realize that our performance was markedly stronger than it had been in previous years. River Hill has not seen such a strong performance since our championship team back in 2010, and this 2nd place ranking is the best performance our team has had in 9 years. Although many mishaps could have been prevented during the competition, potentially costing us many points, we are overall still very pleased with our performance as a team this season. Together, we'd become a legitimate threat to Centennial's team, and that's honestly all I could ask for. We're losing many talented seniors this year with the end of this season, but Centennial will also lose a few, so we hope that this difference balances out and that we can become a serious threat to their existence again next season. Our team is aging, and the majority of our members will be seniors next year. We hope to make Nationals in 2020; I'll keep you guys updated when the season starts again.

Team Members

 * gase456 (2018-2021)
 * 13lade88 (2018-2021)
 * deez (2017-2020)
 * PavGiraffe (2019-2020)
 * Huan (2016-2020)